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Sci-Fi

New Book Reports Soviets Behind Roswell UFO Scare 135

Posted by samzenpus from the I-want-to-believe dept.
jalefkowit writes "A new book by Los Angeles Times Magazine investigative reporter Annie Jacobsen, titled Area 51, reports that that the famous 1947 UFO sightings in Roswell, New Mexico, were actually an attempt by the Soviet Union to demonstrate that they could panic the American population if they wished. According to the book, the UFOs were actually aircraft derived from flying-wing technology, piloted by 'child-size aviators' surgically altered by captured Nazi doctors to appear more frightening. Skeptics note that this account is based on testimony provided to Jacobsen by a single unnamed source, who she describes as one of only five engineers given full access to the crash debris at the top-secret facility in Nevada known as Area 51."
GUI

Ubuntu Unity: The Great Divider 729

Posted by CmdrTaco from the line-in-the-sand dept.
Barence writes "Canonical's decision to impose the new Unity interface on Ubuntu 11.04 users appears to have split the Linux distro's users, according to PC Pro. Features such as a moving Launcher bar and invisible scrollbars have angered many users, with one claiming that 'Ubuntu is doing a great job throwing away years of UI experience.' The rush to meet the six-monthly release schedule also appears to have harmed the release, with many users reporting graphical glitches with the new user interface."
KDE

KDE's New Projects Take On Portable Devices 110

Posted by timothy from the k-stands-for-nothing-if-not-flexibility dept.
jrepin writes "Key KDE developers have been blogging about new projects aimed towards portable devices. As Aaron Seigo says, 'In a nutshell, Plasma Active is about getting the KDE Platform with Plasma providing a compelling user interface ready for and available on hardware devices outside the usual laptop and desktop form factors.' For us mortals, that means an interface for smartphones, tablets, and handhelds."
Privacy

Personal Info of 3.5 Million Texans Was Publicly Accessible 146

Posted by Soulskill from the even-data-breaches-are-bigger-in-texas dept.
SpaceGhost writes "The Houston Chronicle reports, 'Personal information of about 3.5 million Texans — including names, mailing addresses and Social Security numbers — was posted on a publicly accessible server at the state comptroller's office, much of it for more than a year.' Many of the records were for retired teachers and the unemployed, and they sometimes included DOB and drivers license numbers."
America Online

60% of AOL's Profits Come From Misinformed Customers 301

Posted by samzenpus from the check-your-math-again dept.
satuon writes "Ken Auletta's big New Yorker piece on AOL (subscription only) this week revealed an interesting detail about the company's inner workings. According to Auletta, 80% of AOL's profits come from subscribers, and 75% of those subscribers are paying for something they don't actually need. According to Auletta: "The company still gets eighty percent of its profits from subscribers, many of whom are older people who have cable or DSL service but don't realize that they need not pay an additional twenty-five dollars a month to get online and check their e-mail. 'The dirty little secret,' a former AOL executive says, 'is that seventy-five percent of the people who subscribe to AOL's dial-up service don't need it.'"
Facebook

How Facebook Ships Code 314

Posted by CmdrTaco from the wish-i-had-hundreds-of-engineers dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The two largest teams at Facebook are Engineering and Ops, with roughly 400-500 team members each, together making up about 50% of the company. All engineers go through 4 to 6 week 'Boot Camp' training where they learn the Facebook system by fixing bugs. After boot camp, all engineers get access to the live DB and any engineer can modify any part of Facebook's code base and check-in at-will so that engineers can modify specs mid-process, re-order work projects, and inject new feature ideas anytime. Then arguments about whether or not a feature idea is worth doing or not generally get resolved by spending a week implementing it and then testing it on a sample of users, e.g., 1% of Nevada users. 'All changes are reviewed by at least one person, and the system is easy for anyone else to look at and review your code even if you don't invite them to,' writes yeegay. 'It would take intentionally malicious behavior to get un-reviewed code in.' What is interesting for a company this size is that there is no official QA group at Facebook but almost every employee is dogfooding the product every day."
The Military

Sarah Palin 'Target WikiLeaks Like Taliban' 1425

Posted by CmdrTaco from the name-calling dept.
DMandPenfold writes "Sarah Palin, who is widely tipped as a possible Republican candidate for president in 2012, has said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be hunted down in the way armed forces are targeting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda." So that means we should spend billions of dollars and not catch him? Good plan.
Google

Big Media Wants More Piracy Busting From Google 186

Posted by samzenpus from the lend-a-hand dept.
suraj.sun writes "Last month, executives from two music-industry trade groups, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), asked Google if it could provide a means to help them track down pirated material more efficiently. Typically, copyright owners are responsible for finding pirated links and alerting Google, which is required by law to quickly remove the links. But Google's response raised eyebrows at some of the labels. James Pond, a Google manager, wrote in a letter dated September 20, that Google would be happy to help — for a price."

Comment Open source (Score 5, Insightful) 175

by nxsty (#33100582) Attached to: First GNOME Census Results
Greg DeKoenigsberg, an ex-Red Hat employee wrote a blog post slamming Canonical for the "absolutely egregious" statistic and suggesting that Canonical has been "riding on Red Hat's coattails for years." Tough shit. This is open source, if you don't like others using your work you should develop proprietary software instead.
The Internet

Large Irish ISP To Enact "Three Strikes" Rule For Copyright Violation 288

Posted by timothy from the very-very-naughty dept.
Squeeonline writes "One of the biggest broadband providers in Ireland will make the country the first in the world (according to the broadsheet newspaper the Irish Times) to introduce the 'three strikes' rule. 'Eircom will from today begin a process that will lead to cutting off the broadband service of customers found to be repeatedly sharing music online illegally. Ireland is the first country in the world where a system of graduated response is being put in place. Under the pilot scheme, Eircom customers who illegally share copyrighted music will get three warnings before having their broadband service cut off for a year.' ... The mechanism by which it operates was challenged in the courts by the Data Protection Commissioner. Apparently, IP addresses do not constitute 'personal information.' Personally, I use filesharing all the time, but I use it to download large open source Linux ISOs. How will Eircom legally differentiate between that content, and the content that some ragamuffin may be downloading illegally, without infringing privacy laws?"
Google

Google To Pay $500 For Bugs Found In Chromium 175

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the rewards-for-being-1337 dept.
Trailrunner7 writes to mention that a new program from Google could pay security researchers $500 for every security bug found in Chromium. Of course if you find a particularly clever bug you could be eligible for a $1337 reward. "Today, we are introducing an experimental new incentive for external researchers to participate. We will be rewarding select interesting and original vulnerabilities reported to us by the security research community. For existing contributors to Chromium security — who would likely continue to contribute regardless — this may be seen as a token of our appreciation. In addition, we are hoping that the introduction of this program will encourage new individuals to participate in Chromium security. The more people involved in scrutinizing Chromium's code and behavior, the more secure our millions of users will be. Such a concept is not new; we'd like to give serious kudos to the folks at Mozilla for their long-running and successful vulnerability reward program."

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