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Censorship

Microsoft's Bing Refuses Search Term "Sex" In India 355

Posted by timothy from the back-to-spontaneous-generation dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently Microsoft is censoring search results for Bing in India and other countries. If you try to search for the term 'sex,' along with lots of variations, from India using Microsoft's new search engine, an error message is returned that says, 'the search sex may return sexually explicit content. To get results, change your search terms.' There's no preference setting or toggle-on-or-off choice; you simply cannot search for the term 'sex' in India if you are using Bing. While a user still can change their country and try the non-Indian version of Bing, this seems like an unnecessary step and unnecessary censorship on the part of Microsoft. Apparently Google has no problem with Indians searching for the term 'sex.'"
AMD

AMD Invests $7.5M in Transmeta 82

Posted by Zonk from the death-ray-for-peaceful-purposes dept.
trouserless writes with the news that AMD has invested heavily in Transmeta. The power-conscious chip company has been financially ailing of late. AMD is taking payment in stock, binding the two companies (both with suits pending against Intel) together. PC World reports: "Transmeta did secure a few licensing deals, notably in Japan, but it also wracked up heavy losses. In January 2005 the vendor announced job cuts and said it would switch its focus to licensing its power management technology to other companies. Later that year Transmeta agreed to sell its Crusoe chips to Hong Kong company Culturecom Technology Ltd. for $15 million in cash. Last year's deal with AMD, to resell Transmeta chips in Microsoft Corp.'s pay-by-installment PC initiative, raised the vendor's prospects again. But in March Transmeta said it faced delisting from the Nasdaq because its stock price fell below $1 for more than 30 consecutive days."
Data Storage

Tech Magazine Loses June Issue, No Backup 245

Posted by CmdrTaco from the happens-to-everyone dept.
Gareth writes "Business 2.0, a magazine published by Time, has been warning their readers against the hazards of not taking backups of computer files. So much so that in an article published by them in 2003, they 'likened backups to flossing — everyone knows it's important, but few devote enough thought or energy to it.' Last week, Business 2.0 got caught forgetting to floss as the magazine's editorial system crashed, wiping out all the work that had been done for its June issue. The backup server failed to back up."
Education

Submission + - Canadian University students protecting their IP

Submitted by innocent_white_lamb
innocent_white_lamb writes: Graduate students at Carleton University (Ottawa) are taking steps to protect their intellectual property and insuring that they are being properly recognized for their work, according to this article. This is in response to the increased commercialization of research done at universities, and high-profile cases of copyright infringement by professors at the University of Toronto and Indiana University.

Feed KDDI Mobile - KDDI to launch US MVNO, stop the presses! (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Cellphones

KDDI, Japan's number two cellphone carrier, totally blew our minds, everybody: they stated today that they'll be starting up an MVNO on Sprint in the US, name: KDDI Mobile. What's the point of yet another MVNO? (We're obligated to ask.) Well, besides giving Helio a run for their money in the Asian-carrier-gone-US-MVNO biz, maybe, just maybe we'll finally see a slew of totally slick and unbelievably well designed Japanese featurephones stateside (see above). Unfortunately, it sounds like they want to cater to Japanese expats in the US (are there really that many?); either way we definitely just got the warm n' fuzzies.

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Software

MPAA Fires Back at AACS Decryption Utility 343

Posted by samzenpus from the only-a-matter-of-time dept.
RulerOf writes "The AACS Decryption utility released this past December known as BackupHDDVD originally authored by Muslix64 of the Doom9 forums has received its first official DMCA Takedown Notice. It has been widely speculated that the utility itself was not an infringing piece of software due to the fact that it is merely "a textbook implementation of AACS," written with the help of documents publicly available at the AACS LA's website, and that the AACS Volume Unique Keys that the end user isn't supposed to have access to are in fact the infringing content, but it appears that such is not the case." From the thread "...you must input keys and then it will decrypt the encrypted content. If this is the case, than according to the language of the DMCA it does sound like it is infringing. Section 1201(a) says that it is an infringement to "circumvent a technological measure." The phrase, "circumvent a technological measure" is defined as "descramb(ling) a scrambled work or decrypt(ing) an encrypted work, ... without the authority of the copyright owner." If BackupHDDVD does in fact decrypt encrypted content than per the DMCA it needs a license to do that."
Education

Give an Internet Freedom Disk 342

Posted by kdawson from the real-holiday-cheer dept.
An anonymous reader, perhaps the blogger himself, writes to tell us about a new blog aimed at getting non-techies excited over the idea of running from a Live CD. The blogger doesn't call it that, preferring instead "Internet Freedom Disk"; Linux is never mentioned. The submitter adds: "This is just a great gift to drop on your non-geek friends and potentially wake up a sleeping giant." Cheap, last-minute, and you can make them yourself. The blogger isn't selling anything; he provides links to Ubuntu and Knoppix Live CDs. Or pick your favorite.
Power

How to Protect a Home When Away in Winter? 433

Posted by Zonk from the i-suggest-unseen-servant dept.
kidMike writes "I have just accepted a new job in another state, requiring me to relocate. I'm going to keep my house in New England. As I watch the winter storm problems and electrical outages across the country, how do Slashdotters protect their houses (or cabins) when they are away in the winter? Is there a device that will call me if the temp in the house drops below a certain level? How about a broken pipe flooding the house? How can I keep advised of problems happening hundreds of miles away? (There will still be broadband at the house.)"
Music

Does Portable Music Have to be Compressed? 540

Posted by CmdrTaco from the what-lossy-eyes-you-have dept.
FunkeyMonk writes "The Christian Science monitor has an article discussing the gap between music fans and audiophiles when it comes to portable music. Would you pay a few cents more to have lossless downloads from iTunes and other online music retailers? As a classical musician myself, I choose not to download most of my music, but rather rip it myself in lossless format."
Music

Universal Wants a Slice of Apple's iPod Pie 555

Posted by samzenpus from the pay-to-play dept.
vought writes "According to a Reuters report, Universal is now taking the precendent set by Microsoft's Zune and moving to force Apple to include a royalty payment with each iPod. In the words of Universal Music's Doug Morris, 'These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it. So it's time to get paid for it.' Does Microsoft's precedent mean the start of a slippery slope that will add a 'pirate tax' to every piece of hardware that touches digital music?"

PS3 Lines Already Forming In America 452

Posted by samzenpus from the get-a-life dept.
Wowzer writes "Nine days until Sony's PlayStation 3 launches in America, and lines are already forming. From the article: "Someone went to Best Buy this morning and saw about 7 people waiting outside. He went inside and one of the workers told him that they had been there since Monday. It must be a tough job being such big PS3 fans and being the butt of many passer-by jokes like 'Where is the line for PS4? Is it on the other side?'"

Shedding Light On the Black Art of IT Management 57

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the that-web-fad-will-never-catch-on dept.
Cathy writes "An article by Harvard's Andrew McAfee tells nontechnical managers how not to get overwhelmed by the 'drumbeat' of IT projects. McAfee breaks down IT into three categories — functional, network, and enterprise — and says that this framework 'can also indicate which IT initiatives are going to be relatively easy to implement and on which projects executives should focus. In that light, IT management starts to look less like a black art and more like the work of the executive.'"

HomePNA Achieves 320Mbps With Copper 114

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the hot-copper dept.
illeism writes "Ars Techinca is reporting that the HPNA has made a significant stride in copper speed. From the article: 'The HomePNA Alliance, backers of a networking spec that works over coaxial or twisted pair wiring, has announced the release of the HPNA 3.1 specification. The big news comes in the form of a speed jump from 128Mbps to 320Mbps, which pushes it above competing networking standards HomePlug AV and MoCA (Multimedia over Coax) for the title of fastest networking tech outside of gigabit Ethernet and makes it a more attractive option for triple-play providers.'"

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