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Comment how dare they do something so despicable?! (Score 1) 84

using an innocent looking but strategically placed building to stuff as many communication interception hardware as you can without getting thrown out is really a new low. those Chinese, they are so hostile!!!
https://www.ynetnews.com/artic...
https://www.spiegel.de/interna...
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
etc...
Businesses

Stanford Teaching MBAs How To Fight Open Source 430

Posted by timothy from the then-they-fight-you dept.
mjasay writes "As if the proprietary software world needed any help, two business professors from Harvard and Stanford have combined to publish 'Divide and Conquer: Competing with Free Technology Under Network Effects,' a research paper dedicated to helping business executives fight the onslaught of open source software. The professors advise 'the commercial vendor ... to bring its product to market first, to judiciously improve its product features, to keep its product "closed" so the open source product cannot tap into the network already built by the commercial product, and to segment the market so it can take advantage of a divide-and-conquer strategy.' The professors also suggest that 'embrace and extend' is a great model for when the open source product gets to market first. Glad to see that $48,921 that Stanford MBAs pay being put to good use. Having said that, such research is perhaps a great, market-driven indication that open source is having a serious effect on proprietary technology vendors."
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft FAT Patent Fails in Germany

Submitted by
Askmum
Askmum writes: "While Microsft has been granted and been reaffirmed a patent on FAT in the US, the German Patent Federal Court ruled that the patent is invalid in Germany, because it is "not based on inventive activity".

Read more (heise.de, in English)"
Data Storage

Data Storing Bacteria Could Last Millennia 252

Posted by samzenpus from the written-in-the-genes dept.
PetManimal writes "Computerworld has a story about a new technology developed by Keio University researchers that creates artificial bacterial DNA that can carry more than 100 bits of data within the genome sequence. The researchers claimed that they encoded "e= mc2 1905!" on the common soil bacteria, Bacillius subtilis. The bacteria-based data storage method has backup and long-term archival functionality." The researchers say "While the technology would most likely first be used to track medication, it could also be used to store text and images for many millennia, thwarting the longevity issues associated with today's disk and tape storage systems ... The artificial DNA that carries the data to be preserved makes multiple copies of the DNA and inserts the original as well as identical copies into the bacterial genome sequence. The multiple copies work as backup files to counteract natural degradation of the preserved data, according to the newswire. Bacteria have particularly compact DNA, which is passed down from generation to generation. The information stored in that DNA can also be passed on for long-term preservation of large data files."
Science

Huge Reservoir Discovered Beneath Asia 273

Posted by samzenpus from the city-of-R'lyeh dept.
anthemaniac writes "Seismic observations reveal a huge reservoir of water in Earth's mantle beneath Asia. It's actually rock saturated with water, but it's an ocean's worth of water ... as much as is in the whole Arctic Ocean. How did it get there? A slab of water-laden crust sank, and the water evaporated out when it was heated, and then it was trapped, the thinking goes. The discovery fits neatly with the region's heavy seismic activity and fits neatly with the idea that the planet's moving crustal plates are lubricated with water."
Hardware

First Graphene Transistor 83

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the cool-under-pressure dept.
An anonymous reader writes "UK researchers are announcing the first ever workable transistor made of graphene — that's one layer of carbon atoms. It's thinner and smaller than a silicon transistor can ever be, and it works at room temperature. When silicon electronics are dead, this is what many speculate is going to take over. There's slight controversy as they decided to announce their results via a review article, rather than wait for their (submitted) peer review paper to come out."

Audio Watermark Web Spider Starts Crawling 173

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the now-it-just-needs-to-serve-you-papers-automatically dept.
DippityDo writes "A new web tool is scanning the net for signs of copyright infringement. Digimarc's patented system searches video and audio files for special watermarks that would indicate they are not to be shared, then reports back to HQ with the results. It sounds kind of creepy, but has a long way to go before it makes a practical difference. 'For the system to work, players at multiple levels would need to get involved. Broadcasters would need to add identifying watermarks to their broadcast, in cooperation with copyright holders, and both parties would need to register their watermarks with the system. Then, in the event that a user capped a broadcast and uploaded it online, the scanner system would eventually find it and report its location online. Yet the system is not designed to hop on P2P networks or private file sharing hubs, but instead crawls public web sites in search of watermarked material.'"
Movies

Submission + - BitTorrent video download store falls flat

Submitted by seriouslywtf
seriouslywtf writes: We've all heard about BitTorrent going legit this week with legal movie and TV show downloads. Ars Technica took a look at the service to see how useable it was and ran into a few snags, including not being able to download or even open the video files on some computers. However, the ones that they did manage to open varied a lot in quality. Overall, they blame DRM. From the article:

Without knowing whether browser compatibility and dysfunctional video files are a rare occurrence or not, it's hard to say whether BitTorrent's service is a good one overall. Our initial experiences have been disappointing and frustrating, and guess what the culprit is once again? DRM. Why the DRM failed to work on 50% of our purchases is not clear, but whatever the cause, it's simply unacceptable.
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Dow Jones Plunge Fueled by Overwhelmed Computers

Submitted by
cloudscout
cloudscout writes: "The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped over 400 points today. While there were various valid financial reasons for such a decline, some of the blame is being placed on computer systems that couldn't keep up with the abnormally high volume at the New York Stock Exchange and the resulting tremor as they switched over to a backup system. In other words, Dow Jones got Slashdotted."

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