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Comment Thrift store videophone to video game hack (Score 2, Interesting) 210

by pHalec (#50040863) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Is Your Most Unusual Hardware Hack?

This one was kind of fun:

http://cassettepunk.com/large-projects/phonetendo/

It's a crappy video phone that was "given away" with a contract, and I got it from a thrift store for $8 or so. Turns out it's got a Linux SBC in it, so between some of my own hacking and others who had reverse-engineered it, I turned it into a video game of sorts.

Comment Art vs. Hacking (Score 1) 31

by pHalec (#48603351) Attached to: Interviews: Ask Jonty Hurwitz About Art and Engineering

Jonty, I'm mixing hacking and art and becoming increasingly aware of the self-segragation of creative work into either "art" or "hacking". Here in Vancouver, for example, we have "art" events (art crawls, galleries, etc.) and "maker" culture (maker faires, hackspaces, etc.) with almost zero crossover. The presumption is that art will be expressive, shown in public, and saleable, and hacking will be insular, self-funded, and have limited appeal outside other hackers.

I've exhibited technological work on a small scale to an art crowd and gotten a positive response, but I worry that going further on that side of things will be an uphill battle. The knee-jerk response may be "that doesn't belong here".

Have you encountered this kind of pigeonholing? If so, how have you approached it?
Science

Alleged 'Bigfoot' DNA Samples Sequenced, Turn Out To Be Horses, Dogs, and Bears 198

Posted by Soulskill from the film-at-never dept.
sciencehabit writes: In North America, they're called Bigfoot or Sasquatch. In the Himalayan foothills, they're known as yeti or abominable snowmen. And Russians call them Almasty. But in the scientific laboratory, these elusive, hairy, humanoid creatures are nothing more than bears, horses, and dogs. That's the conclusion of a new study—the first peer-reviewed, genetic survey of biological samples claimed to be from the shadowy beasts. To identify the evolutionary source of each sample, the team determined the sequence of a gene—found inside the mitochondria of cells—that encodes the 12S RNA, which is often used for species identification. Unlike standard DNA, mitochondrial genes are passed only from mother to offspring.

Seven of the samples didn’t yield enough DNA for identification. Of the 30 that were sequenced, all matched the exact 12S RNA sequences for known species, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Ten hairs belonged to various bear species; four were from horses; four were from wolves or dogs; one was a perfect match to a human hair; and the others came from cows, raccoons, deer, and even a porcupine. Two samples, from India and Bhutan, matched polar bear 12S RNA—a surprising finding that Sykes is following up on to determine whether some Himalayan bears are hybrid species with polar bears.
Classic Games (Games)

The Rise and Fall of the Cheat Code 178

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the iddqd dept.
An anonymous reader writes A new feature published this week takes a deep-dive look at the history of the cheat code and its various manifestations over the years, from manual 'pokes' on cassettes to pass phrases with their own dedicated menus — as well as their rise from simple debug tool in the early days of bedroom development to a marketing tactic when game magazines dominated in the 1990s, followed by dedicated strategy guides. Today's era of online play has all but done away with them, but the need for a level playing field isn't the only reason for their decline: as one veteran coder points out, why give away cheats for free when you can charge for them as in-app purchases? "Bigger publishers have now realized you can actually sell these things to players as DLC. Want that special gun? Think you can unlock it with a cheat code? Nope! You've got to give us some money first!"
Earth

Scientists Warn of Rising Oceans As Antarctic Ice Melts 784

Posted by samzenpus from the it's-getting-hot-in-here dept.
mdsolar (1045926) writes "The collapse of large parts of the ice sheet in West Antarctica appears to have begun and is almost certainly unstoppable, with global warming accelerating the pace of the disintegration, two groups of scientists reported Monday. The finding, which had been feared by some scientists for decades, means that a rise in global sea level of at least 10 feet may now be inevitable. The rise may continue to be relatively slow for at least the next century or so, the scientists said, but sometime after that it will probably speed up so sharply as to become a crisis."
China

Activists Angry After Apple Axes Anti-Firewall App 196

Posted by Soulskill from the welcome-to-the-world-walled-web dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "BBC reports that Chinese web users are criticizing Apple after the company pulled a free iPhone app called OpenDoor, which enables users to bypass firewalls and access restricted internet sites. The developers of OpenDoor — who wish to remain anonymous — told Radio Netherlands that Apple removed the app because it 'includes content that is illegal in China.' 'It is unclear to us how a simple browser app could include illegal contents, since it's the user's own choosing of what websites to view,' say the developers. 'Using the same definition, wouldn't all browser apps, including Apple's own Safari and Google's Chrome, include illegal contents?' Chinese internet users were disappointed by the move by Apple. Zhou Shuguang, a prominent Chinese blogger and citizen journalist, told U.S.-based Radio Free Asia that Apple had taken away one of the tools which internet users in China relied on to circumvent the country's great firewall. 'Apple is determined to have a share of the huge cake which is the Chinese internet market. Without strict self-censorship, it cannot enter the Chinese market,' says one Chinese user disappointed by the move by Apple."

Comment Re:interestingly, has always been open source (Score 3, Informative) 43

by pHalec (#44490967) Attached to: Backdoor Found In OpenX Ad Platform

OpenX has been through many twists and turns. I started using it with my employer when it was called phpAdsNew; it then became OpenAds; then OpenX.

It gradually went from a passably supported and FOSS-minded project to a hybrid model, with the FOSS part atrophying very quickly. It became clear to us that this was a liability and we stopped using it. We're now actively avoiding hybrid models like this.

Finding a 7-month-old backdoor vindicates our suspicions.
Privacy

Skype Hands Teenager's Information To Private Firm 214

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the but-we-were-friends dept.
New submitter andrew3 writes "Skype has allegedly handed the information of a 16-year-old boy to a security firm. The information was later handed over to Dutch law enforcement. No court order was served for the disclosure. The teenager was suspected of being part of a DDoS packet flood as a part of the Anonymous 'Operation Payback'." According to the article, Skype voluntarily disclosed the information to the third party firm without any kind of police order, possibly violating a few privacy laws and their own policies.

Comment If only there was some kind of standard... (Score 1) 332

by pHalec (#39711379) Attached to: iTunes' Windows Problem

Ever tried to use an iPhone with Linux? If you can't run iTunes you can't do *anything*.

iTunes is a tool Apple uses to avoid using standards and thereby maintain full control over the user's experience. They're tying themselves in knots trying to do it all within a single app, but the alternative -- things like allowing the phone to be used as a USB storage device, as pretty much every other vendor does -- is un-Apple. It's a wonder they even support PTP for photos.

I've happily gone over to Android, which does have its own quirks, but at least my Samsung phone hasn't been crippled by the vendor.
Mars

Virtual Reality Helmet Designed For Deep Space Surgery 83

Posted by samzenpus from the wearing-the-doctor-hat dept.
pigrabbitbear writes in with a link about a virtual reality helmet designed to help people deal with medical emergencies in space. "Humans are pretty fragile. A bad break in your hip can mean surgery and months of rehab. That's pretty bad, but what if you fall and break your hip on the Moon, or even Mars? You'd be hundreds of thousands or millions of miles from a fully stocked hospital and a surgeon with steady hands. There's the option of doctor-assisted surgery from Earth — a fellow astronaut performing the surgery with remote assistance from a doctor via video link. But the lengthy communications delay make this a poor option anywhere further than the Moon. Luckily for our Mars-bound descendants, the European Space Agency has a solution: an information-loaded assisted reality helmet that will let anyone identify and perform minor surgery to repair injuries."
Businesses

Volkswagen Turns Off E-mail After Work-Hours 377

Posted by Soulskill from the we'll-fix-it-in-the-morning dept.
wired_parrot writes "Responding to complaints from employees that email outside of working hours was disrupting their lives, Volkswagen has taken the step of shutting their email servers outside work-hours. Other companies have taken similar steps, with at least one taking the extraordinary step of banning internal e-mail altogether. Is this new awareness of the disruption work email brings on employee's personal life a trend?"

Comment Journal management software (Score 1) 103

by pHalec (#37902346) Attached to: Open Hardware Journal

Hi Bruce!

Obviously I'm biased, since I work on the project -- but have you seen Public Knowledge Project's "Open Journal Systems"? It's FOSS and its goal is to automate the management and workflow for publishing an academic-style journal. It wouldn't do your layout etc. for you, but it would help with submission management, peer review, and a lot of the associated stuff that needs doing. See http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs for the details.

Cheers,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

Comment Data plans in Canada (Score 1) 268

by pHalec (#24758277) Attached to: TELUS Forcing Customers Off Unlimited Plans

Telus received the last dollar they'll ever see from me years ago. They operate with the complacency of a monopoly and the ruthlessness of the worst private operation.

Good data plans are hard to come by in Canada; at the moment, Rogers has a temporary high-limit package that looks relatively attractive (expires at the end of August). Cracks are showing in the data provider cartel's uniform high prices and it's only a matter of time before someone jumps in with a reasonable data package and forces the rest down. Until then, I'll wait. If it's Telus that cracks first, I'll wait.

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