Google has pulled several "stalkerware" ads that violated its policies by promoting apps that encouraged prospective users to spy on their spouses' phone. From a report: These consumer-grade spyware apps are often marketed to parents wishing to monitor their child's calls, messages, apps, photos and location, often under the guise of protecting against predators. But these apps, which are often designed to be installed surreptitiously and without the device owner's consent, have been repurposed by abusers to spy on the phones of their spouses.

[...] Last August, Google banned ads in users' search results that promoted apps that are designed "with the express purpose of tracking or monitoring another person or their activities without their authorization." But TechCrunch found five app makers were still advertising their stalkerware apps as recently as last week. "We do not allow ads promoting spyware for partner surveillance. We immediately removed the ads that violated this policy and will continue to track emerging behaviors to prevent bad actors from trying to evade our detection systems," a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Zothecula writes: The Silent Power PC is claimed to be the first high-end PC able to ditch noisy electric fans in favor of fully passive cooling. In place of a conventional fan, the unit uses an open-air metal foam heatsink that boasts an enormous surface area thanks to the open-weave copper filaments of which it's composed. The Silent Power creators claim that the circulation of air through the foam is so efficient in dissipating heat that the exterior surface temperature never rises above 50 C (122 F) in normal use.

eldavojohn writes "We've only had evidence for three kinds of neutrinos so far, but a recent test at Fermilab involving an antineutrino beam has reinforced a Michigan researcher's earlier experiment suggesting a fourth flavor. What's really odd about this is that a prior neutrino test (carried out as part of project MiniBooNE) did not result in indications of such strange oscillations. According to the researcher, 'The simplest explanation involves adding new neutrino-like particles, or sterile neutrinos, which do not have the normal weak interactions.' But this could also be an unknown or misunderstood effect. A Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist added that an explanation of this strange anomaly could result in understanding 'matter asymmetry of the universe, or why the universe is primarily composed of matter, rather than antimatter.' The results are published in the Physical Review Letters."

Google85 writes "The OpenOffice.org Project has unveiled a major restructuring that separates itself from Oracle and that takes responsibility for OpenOffice away from a single company. From now on, OpenOffice's development and direction will be decided by a steering committee of developers and national language project managers. Driving home the changes, the OpenOffice.org project is now The Document Foundation, while the OpenOffice.org suite has been given the temporary name of LibreOffice."

Turn-based strategy is an underrepresented genre of video games. Perhaps it's because they aren't as flashy, or aren't as embedded in the public consciousness as the more popular types of games. Or maybe because it's so damn hard to build them right. The first Civilization game came out 19 years ago. (Feel old? Sorry.) Despite changes in design leadership over the years, Sid Meier and the Firaxis crew realized that they had a solid foundation, and poured their efforts into refining everything that worked, and revamping everything that didn't. Civilization V reflects not just a few years of direct development after the launch of Civ 4, but also nearly two decades of continually evolving game design. Read on for the rest of my thoughts.

Blacklaw passes along an excerpt from Thing.co.uk that begins "While other manufacturers are content to develop dual-core ARM processors, Marvell has gone one better — literally — with a new triple-core chip called the Armada 628. The system-on-chip design, based on ARM's v7 MP series, features two dedicated 1.5GHz processing cores plus a third 624MHz core in a single application processor — making Marvell the first company to bring such a beast to market. While two of the cores are a pretty standard SMP setup, as seen in other dual-core ARM implementations, the third is a standalone processor designed for ultra-low-power draw. The idea behind such a design is that when the system is idle, or only running a low-performance application on a single thread, it can shut off the dual-core portion and save oodles of power."

norton123 writes "SEE has announced plans to published a Michael Jackson themed MMO. From the article: 'Planet Michael is described by SEE as "a massive social gaming experience" with "collaborative in-game activities," set in "an immersive virtual space themed after iconic visuals drawn from Michael's music, his life and the global issues that concerned him."'"

jc79 writes "David McCandless of InformationIsBeautiful.net has created a crowdsourced dataset of every time travel journey the Doctor made in every episode of the series since 1963. Who wants to visualise it?" Previous efforts have resulted in this amazing visualization of time travel intersecting Bill & Ted, Back to the Future, Time Bandits, Buck Rogers, Planet of the Apes and many more.

necro81 writes "The NY Times is reporting that former Senator Ted Stevens was aboard a small plane with eight others that crashed in remote southwest Alaska Monday night. Some news outlets are reporting that he died, along with at least four others. Meanwhile, the North American CEO of aerospace firm EADS and former NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe was was also reported in the crash. Rescue crews from the Alaska Air National Guard reached the site about ten hours after the initial crash."