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Submission + - Plant Breeders Release First 'Open Source Seeds' (npr.org)

Submitted by mr crypto
mr crypto writes: Ag with an OSS twist: "A group of scientists and food activists is launching a campaign Thursday to change the rules that govern seeds. They're releasing 29 new varieties of crops under a new "open source pledge" that's intended to safeguard the ability of farmers, gardeners and plant breeders to share those seeds freely."

Submission + - Here's What Wi-Fi Would Look Like If We Could See It (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: Artist Nickolay Lamm, a blogger for MyDeals.com, decided to shed some light on the subject. He created visualizations that imagine the size, shape, and color of wi-fi signals were they visible to the human eye.

"I feel that by showing what wi-fi would look like if we could see it, we'd appreciate the technology that we use everyday," Lamm told me in an email. "A lot of us use technology without appreciating the complexity behind making it work."

Submission + - Kodak ended in-house production of acetate base used to make photographic film (rochesterhomepage.net)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: According to a report by Rochester, NY CBS affiliate WROC (http://rochesterhomepage.net/fulltext?nxd_id=394722) Kodak has ended in-house production of the cellulose acetate base that is the primary component of photographic film.

Popular Photography magazine adds (http://rochesterhomepage.net/fulltext?nxd_id=394722) that, for more than 100 years, Kodak has made the acetate in house in bulk, providing the structural basis for the company's film. Now, with Kodak in bankruptcy, the company is firing 60 workers and shutting down the acetate machinery. Citing the decline in interest in film photography as a primary cause, Kodak will no longer undertake the time intensive process of acetate production.

Thankfully, the company has large stockpiles of the material, and once that runs out they will source it from elsewhere.

Submission + - Google Chrome 27 Is Out: 5% Faster Page Loads

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Google on Tuesday released Chrome version 27 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The new version features a big boost to page loads (now 5 percent faster on average) as well as significant updates for developers. You can update to the latest release now using the browser's built-in silent updater, or download it directly from google.com/chrome.

Submission + - Dart Is Not the Language You Think It Is

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Seth Ladd has an excellent write-up of Dart "When Dart was originally launched, many developers mistook it for some sort of Java clone. In truth, Dart is inspired by a range of languages such as Smalltalk, Strongtalk, Erlang, C#, and JavaScript. Get past the semicolons and curly braces, and you’ll see a terse language without ceremony. "

Submission + - Patenting open source software (outercurve.org)

Submitted by dp619
dp619 writes: The tactic of patenting open source software to guard against patent trolls and the weaponization of corporate patent portfolios is gaining momentum in the FOSS community. Organizations including the Open Innovation Network, Google and Redhat have built defensive patent portfolios (the latter two are defending their product lines). This approach has limitations.

Penn State law professor Clark Asay writes in an Outercurve Foundation blog examining the trend, "Patenting FOSS may help in some cases, but the nature of FOSS development itself may mean that patenting some collaboratively developed inventions is inherently more difficult, if not impossible, in many others. Consequently, strategies for mitigating patent risk that rely on FOSS communities patenting their technologies include inherent limitations. Itâ(TM)s not entirely clear how best to reform patent law in order to better reconcile it with alternative models of innovation. But in the meantime, FOSS still presents certain advantages that, while dimmed by the prospect of patent suits, remain significant."

Submission + - Intelligence agencies turn to crowdsourcing (bbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: IARPA — the sister agency to DARPA — is sponsoring researchers to examine crowdsourcing as a method to derive better intelligence predictions. The article says that this research will eventually be transitioned to the intelligence community to improve national intelligence estimates. Anyone can participate — even the general public. www.globalcrowd.com
Biotech

Submission + - Fathers bequeath more mutations as they age (nature.com)

Submitted by
ananyo
ananyo writes: "In the 1930s, the pioneering geneticist J. B. S. Haldane noticed a peculiar inheritance pattern in families with long histories of haemophilia. The faulty mutation responsible for the blood-clotting disorder tended to arise on the X chromosomes that fathers passed to their daughters, rather than on those that mothers passed down. Haldane subsequently proposed that children inherit more mutations from their fathers than their mothers, although he acknowledged that “it is difficult to see how this could be proved or disproved for many years to come”.
That year has finally arrived: whole-genome sequencing of dozens of Icelandic families has at last provided the evidence that eluded Haldane. Moreover, the study, published in Nature, finds that the age at which a father sires children determines how many mutations those offspring inherit. By starting families in their thirties, forties and beyond, men could be increasing the chances that their children will develop autism, schizophrenia and other diseases often linked to new mutations (abstract)."
Hardware

Submission + - TV with 16 times resolution of HDTV passed by UN standards body (techworld.com) 1

Submitted by Qedward
Qedward writes: A new television format that has 16 times the resolution of current High Definition TV has been approved by an international standards body, Japanese sources said earlier today.

UHDTV, or Ultra High Definition Television, allows for programming and broadcasts at resolutions of up to 7680 by 4320, along with frame refresh rates of up to 120Hz, double that of most current HDTV broadcasts. The format also calls for a broader palette of colours that can be displayed on screen.

The video format was approved earlier this month by member nations of the International Telecommunication Union, a standards and regulatory body agency of the United Nations, according to an official at NHK, Japan's public broadcasting station, and another at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. Both spoke on condition of anonymity.
Security

Submission + - After Hacker Exposes Hotel Lock Insecurity, Lock Firm Asks Hotels To Pay For Fix (forbes.com)

Submitted by Sparrowvsrevolution
Sparrowvsrevolution writes: In an update to an earlier story on Slashdot, hotel lock company Onity is now offering a hardware fix for the millions of hotel keycard locks that hacker Cody Brocious demonstrated at Black Hat were vulnerable to being opened by a sub-$50 Arduino device. Unfortunately, Onity wants the hotels who already bought the company's insecure product to pay for the fix.

Onity is actually offering two different mitigations: The first is a plug that blocks the port that Brocious used to gain access to the locks' data, as well as more-obscure Torx screws to prevent intruders from opening the lock's case and removing the plug. That band-aid style fix is free. A second, more rigorous fix requires changing the locks' circuit boards manually. In that case, Onity is offering "special pricing programs" for the new circuit boards customers need to secure their doors, and requiring them to also pay the shipping and labor costs.
Google

Submission + - The Worst Job at Google: A Year of Watching Child Porn and other trash (gizmodo.com)

Submitted by
Cutting_Crew
Cutting_Crew writes: "Gizmodo puts a story together that describes the worst job that you can get at google , including watching decapitations and beastiality.

A google ex-employee who did just that tells his own story of a year long stint of looking at the most horrible things on the internet and in the end needed therapy and since he was a contractor he was let go and was not rolled over into a full time employee."
IT

Submission + - IT salaries and hiring are up - but just to 2008 levels (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
tsamsoniw
tsamsoniw writes: "A mid-year salary survey has a mix of good and bad news for IT professionals: The good news, hiring is slowly increasing as companies bring more IT operations back in house and salaries are creeping up a bit. But compensation (including benefits) are just now reaching 2008 levels — and hiring will remain soft, at least until the presidential election is over."

Submission + - VA Governor Wants Military Drones for Police (wtop.com) 1

Submitted by Screen404-O
Screen404-O writes: During radio interview ( http://wtop.com/120/2882193/Gov-Drones-over-Va-great-cites-battlefield-success ) VA Governor suggest that "Police drones flying over Virginia would be "great" and "the right thing to do" for the same reasons they are so effective in a battlefield environment,..."

Is this the next step toward militarizing our law enforcement with the ever present "eye in the sky"? What are the privacy implications?
Google

Submission + - Sergey Brin Demos Google Glasses Prototype (hothardware.com)

Submitted by
MojoKid
MojoKid writes: "Folks have been clamoring for more on Google's Project Glass and Sergey Brin--one of the co-founders of Google is now burying himself in the R&D department associated with its development. Recently Brin appeared on “The Gavin Newsom Show” on The Current with the prototype glasses perched on his face. The visit was actually a bit awkward as you can see in the video, as it’s a lot of Brin and Newsom describing what they’re seeing via the glasses with no visual for the audience. However, Brin dropped a bomb when he stated that he’d like to have the glasses out as early as next year."
Businesses

Submission + - Apple Fires Back At DoJ Over eBook Price Fixing (cnn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: CNN takes a look at Apple's response to the Department of Justice's investigation into eBook price fixing. The filing 'cuts the government's case to shreds' while at the same time not bothering to defend the five publishers also under investigation. Apple said, 'The Government starts from the false premise (PDF) that an eBooks "market" was characterized by "robust price competition" prior to Apple's entry. This ignores a simple and incontrovertible fact: before 2010, there was no real competition, there was only Amazon. At the time Apple entered the market, Amazon sold nearly nine out of every ten eBooks, and its power over price and product selection was nearly absolute.'

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