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Submission + - Shuttleworth Agrees To FSF Demands For Edge Phone (infoworld.com)

Submitted by WebMink
WebMink writes: In an interview at OSCON, Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical spoke about the vision behind the Ubuntu Edge phone as a concept device to test features the mobile industry is too conservative to try. Notably, he agreed with the Free Software Foundation's demands that the device should carry no proprietary software and have Free drivers (transcript):

So what’s going to be in there? That’s all going to be free software?
Yes, we’ll ship this with Android and Ubuntu, no plans to put proprietary applications on it. We haven’t finalised the silicon selection so we’re looking at the next generation silicon from all major vendors. I would like to ship it with all Free drivers.

Submission + - Lawmakers Who Upheld NSA Phone Spying Received Double the Defense Industry Cash (wired.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The numbers tell the story — in votes and dollars. On Wednesday, the House voted 217 to 205 not to rein in the NSA’s phone-spying dragnet. It turns out that those 217 “no” voters received twice as much campaign financing from the defense and intelligence industry as the 205 “yes” voters.

Submission + - College students hijack $80 million yacht with GPS signal spoofing (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: A team of students at the University of Texas at Austin built and successfully tested a custom GPS spoofing device to remotely redirect an $80 million yacht onto a different route. The project was completed with the permission of the yacht's owners in the Mediterranean Sea this past June.

Because the yacht's crew relies entirely on GPS signal for direction, the students were able to lead the yacht onto a different course without the knowledge of anyone on-board. The GPS spoofing device essentially over-powered all other GPS signals using until the spoofed signal was the only one that the yacht followed.

The team then used the GPS spoofing device to convince the ship's crew to redirect onto a different route voluntarily. By changing the signal on the spoofing device, the students led the crew to believe that the ship was drifting off-course to the left. In response, the crew steered the ship to the right, thinking that it would get the ship back on course, when it actually brought the ship off the course entirely.

Submission + - Judge Rules in Favor of Volkswagen and Silences Scientist (theguardian.com)

Submitted by sl4shd0rk
sl4shd0rk writes: Samsung-is-not-as-cool-as-Apple Judge Colin Birss, rules in favor of Volkswagon to ban Flavio Garcia, a computer scientist, from revealing details about "Wirelessly Lockpicking a Vehicle Immobiliser" at USENIX in August. Volkswagen says the flaw could allow someone to "break the security and steal a car" so it is justifiable grounds for blocking Flavio's paper. No word yet on how soon Volkswagen will have a patch for their bungled technology which is responsible for the exploit.

Submission + - Should TV networks put pilots online for judgement like Amazon is doing? (ew.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: EW debates how broadcasters might (and might not) benefit from letting the Internet help decide which of their pilots get series orders (like Amazon is doing with their new original content efforts). If NBC had posted its pilots online, would we have been spared 'Animal Practice'?

Submission + - Google forbids advertising on Glass (thepointdaily.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Contrary to widespread thought, Google Glass will not be an advertising platform: "Google Inc has lately told app developers that they are not allowed to present ads to Google Glass users and they are also not permitted to sell users’ personal and private information for the fulfillment of advertising needs. The internet company has explicitly and openly said that the Glass platform should and must be clean and clear of any ads whatsoever, because the technology is designed to facilitate internet browsing and other related activities, therefore, the featured podium cannot be used to advertise products as it will cause the user experience to diminish." Seems like Google is going for hardware-only revenue on this one.

Submission + - British Regulator Investigated Over Low 4G Auction Revenue (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by judgecorp
judgecorp writes: Ofcom, the British telecom regulator, raised £2.3 billion in the 4G spectrum auction when the government had hoped for £3.5 billion. Now Ofcom's auction is being investigated by the National Audit Office over whether it provided value for money for the British taxpayer. Ironically, the auction resulted in a low price but spread the bandwidth amongst rival firms, and so provided better value than if the auction had created a partial monopoly or (as happened in the 3G auctions in 2000) gouged as much money as possible from the operators leaving them unable to actually build a network.

Submission + - The Internet Archive is now the Largest collection of Historical Software (paritynews.com) 1

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: The Internet Archive has a great collection of books, music, visual items and websites but, it had one thing lacking up until now – archive of software. This has changed recently as The Internet Archive now holds the largest collection of software in the world and has challenged everyone to find a bigger one. The expansion at the Internet Archive has come through collaboration with other independent archives like that Disk Drives collection, the FTP site boneyard, Shareware CD Archive, and the TOSEC archive. The archive doesn’t hold just the software – it also holds documentation as well.
Music

Submission + - Can You Really Hear the Difference Between Lossless, Lossy Audio? (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
CWmike
CWmike writes: "Lossless audio formats that retain the sound quality of original recordings while also offering some compression for data storage are being championed by musicians like Neil Young and Dave Grohl, who say compressed formats like the MP3s being sold on iTunes rob listeners of the artist's intent. By Young's estimation, CDs can only offer about 15% of the data that was in a master sound track, and when you compress that CD into a lossy MP3 or AAC file format, you lose even more of the depth and quality of a recording. Audiophiles, who have long remained loyal to vinyl albums, are also adopting the lossless formats, some of the most popular of which are FLAC and AIFF, and in some cases can build up terabyte-sized album collections as the formats are still about five times the size of compressed audio files. Even so, digital music sites like HDtracks claim about three hundred thousand people visit each month to purchase hi-def music. And for music purists, some of whom are convinced there's a significant difference in sound quality, listening to lossy file formats in place of lossless is like settling for a Volkswagon instead of a Ferrari."
Microsoft

Submission + - Windows RT uses almost 1/2 the storage on 32GB Surface Tablet

Submitted by jigamo
jigamo writes: Microsoft's newly released Surface tablets are available in 32 and 64 GB capacities. The company has disclosed how much of that space is available to the user. After taking into account Windows RT, Microsoft Office, built-in apps, and Windows recovery tools, nearly 13 GB of the available space is eliminated from user accessible storage. Microsoft's recommendations for adding additional capacity are to use cloud storage, a memory card, or a USB storage device.
Space

Submission + - Black Hole's Spinning Heart of Darkness (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Like all invisible things that are only partly understood, black holes evoke a sense of mystery. Astronomers know that the tremendous gravitational pull of a black hole sucks matter in, and that the material falling in causes powerful jets of particles to shoot out of the hole at nearly the speed of light. But how exactly this phenomenon occurs remains a matter of conjecture, because astronomers have never quite managed to observe the details – until now.

Astrophysicists have taken the closest look to date at the region where matter swirls around a black hole. By measuring the size of the base of a jet shooting out of the supermassive black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy, the researchers conclude that the black hole must be spinning and that the material orbiting must also be swirling in the same direction. Some of the material from this orbiting "accretion disk" is also falling into the black hole, like water swirling down a drain.
Microsoft

Submission + - How Microsoft is wooing college kids to write apps for Windows 8 (businessweek.com)

Submitted by SquarePixel
SquarePixel writes: Bloomberg has an interesting story about Microsoft's efforts to simultaneously woo younger workers and to get more apps into its Windows Store. "Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, designed Windows 8 for touch-screen technology included in the company's first tablet, Surface, and other devices coming this year. To gain share in tablets, a market expected by DisplaySearch to reach $66.4 billion in 2012, Microsoft needs enough apps to challenge the more than 200,000 available for iPad. Using student recruits is one way Microsoft can woo app developers who are used to building programs for mobile phones and tablets, where the company has little and no share, respectively. Luring programmers before graduation is particularly critical for recruitment in the U.S., which lags behind countries such as India and China in its ability to crank out qualified engineers."
Hardware

Submission + - iPhone 5 teardown reveals why it is so light (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Although the iPhone 5 looks distinctly iPhone-ish, it has in fact been completely redesigned from the larger display to the new dock connector, but what iFixit is most interested in is what’s inside, and they weren’t shy about showing us exactly what’s at the heart of Apple’s latest smartphone.

iFixit figured out how Apple managed to save so much weight while still making the display larger and adding the extra electronics to support LTE. It all comes down to the back casing, which weighs almost the same as just the glass in the 4S. Mystery solved.
NASA

Submission + - Dawn spacecraft finds signs of water on Vesta (nature.com)

Submitted by
ananyo
ananyo writes: "Vesta, the second-most-massive body in the asteroid belt, was thought to be bone dry. But NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has found evidence that smaller, water-rich asteroids once implanted themselves in Vesta’s surface. The water stays locked up in hydrated minerals until subsequent impacts create enough heat to melt the rock and release the water as a gas, leaving pitted vents in the surface. The discovery shows that yet another body in the inner Solar System has a water cycle."

Submission + - Cables show US seeks Assange

Submitted by prakslash
prakslash writes: Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that according to the diplomatic cables obtained by them, despite the denials by the US State Department and the Australian Foreign minister, the US investigation into possible criminal conduct by Mr Assange has been ongoing for more than a year. Further, the Australian diplomats expect that the US will seek to extradite Assange to the US on charges including espionage and conspiracy relating to the release of classified information by WikiLeaks.

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