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Music

Submission + - Music pirates won't rush to iCloud for forgiveness (theconversation.edu.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Lots of people have suggested there’s a loophole in Apple’s new iCloud that will allow people who illegally download music to somehow “launder” their dirty music files, getting a nice clean, and legal, license to the music stored on iCloud. This argument is flawed for two main reasons.

The first has to do with how the laws of copyright work and the second is to do with why people share or download music (and movies) in the first place.
Windows

Submission + - Takedown letters for WP7 Tetris Clones (karios.gr)

Submitted by karios
karios writes: Today I received a takedown letter from a law firm representing the Tetris Company for copyright violation for my game Tetrada which I published on the Windows Phone 7 marketplace. The witch hunt, after Android, iOS and other platforms continues on Windows Phone 7 which is a pity, since some of tetrominoes games in the Marketplace were pretty decent.
The Internet

Submission + - Internet is Easy Prey for Governments

Submitted by Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: Douglas Rushkoff writes on CNN that the revolution in Egypt starkly reveals the limits of our internet tools and the ease with which those holding power can take them away. "Old media, such as terrestrial radio and television, were as distributed as the thousands of stations and antennae from which broadcast signals emanated, but all internet traffic must pass through government and corporate-owned choke points," says Rushkoff adding that when push came to shove over WikiLeaks in the US the very same government authority was used to cut off "enemies of the state" from access and funding. Rushkoff suggests that we use the lessons of the internet to build a communications infrastructure that cannot be controlled from the top. Back before the internet, many early computer hobbyists networked on Fidonet, a simple peer-to-peer network and now digital activists propose reviving such ideas with mesh networking over Wi-Fi networks that could connect inhabitants of an entire city without anyone having an internet service provider. "Until we choose to develop such alternative networks, our insistence on seeing the likes of Facebook and Twitter as the path toward freedom for all people will only serve to increase our dependence on corporations and government for the right to assemble and communicate."
Science

Submission + - Australian Aborigines the first 'astronomers'? (news.com.au)

Submitted by brindafella
brindafella writes: Look out, Stonehenge, here come the Wurdi Youang rocks in the Australian state of Victoria. A semi-circle of stones as been checked by an astrophysicist from Australia's premier research group, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), who says this arrangement of rocks is a carefully aligned solar observatory that may be 10,000 years old. It would have been created by local Aborigines, the Wathaurong people, who have occupied the area for some 25,000 years.
Network

Submission + - Verizon to throttle "high" bandwidth users (tekgoblin.com)

Submitted by tekgoblin
tekgoblin writes: Verizon has enacted a new policy today that allows them to throttle "high" bandwidth users on their network. Were not sure exactly what "high" means but it is probably over 2GB of data per month. This comes as the iPhone launches on Verizon's network. The policy is said to only affect the top 5% of data users on the network. When these 5% of users hit the soft limit they will be throttled during peak times of the day.

        Verizon Wireless strives to provide customers the best experience when using our network, a shared resource among tens of millions of customers. To help achieve this, if you use an extraordinary amount of data and fall within the top 5% of Verizon Wireless data users we may reduce your data throughput speeds periodically for the remainder of your then current and immediately following billing cycle to ensure high quality network performance for other users at locations and times of peak demand. Our proactive management of the Verizon Wireless network is designed to ensure that the remaining 95% of data customers aren't negatively affected by the inordinate data consumption of just a few users.
Australia

Submission + - No internet “kill switch” for Australi (delimiter.com.au) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Well, it looks as though at least some Governments have a backbone. Egypt switched off its internet to stop protests over the past few days, and the US Government is considering legislation that will give the President "kill switch" powers over the internet as well. But in Australia, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy — best known for his attempt to filter the country's internet for child pornography and the country's flagship national fibre broadband rollout, says such a scenario couldn't occur. Thank God.

Submission + - Statistician Cracks Code for Lottery Tickets (lotterypost.com)

Submitted by Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: Lottery Post has an interesting story about Mohan Srivastava, an MIT educated statistician who became intrigued by a particular type of scratch-off lottery ticket called an extended-play game — sometimes referred to as a baited hook — that has a tic-tac-toe grid of visible numbers that looks like a miniature spreadsheet. Srivastava discovered a defect in the game: The visible numbers turned out to reveal essential information about the digits hidden under the latex coating. Nothing needed to be scratched off — the ticket could be cracked if you figured out the secret code. Srivastava's fundamental insight was that the apparent randomness of the scratch ticket was just a facade, a mathematical lie because the software that generates the tickets has to precisely control the number of winners while still appearing random. "It wasn't that hard," says Srivastava. "I do the same kind of math all day long."

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