Lanxon writes "Wired reports that for one French fan, the Stormtrooper has become an obsession. Stormtroopers 365 is a collection of wacky, witty, and artistic photographs that its creator Stéfan Le Dû has been adding to daily since 3 April 2009 when the project began. 'I got a new camera and I had some Stormtrooper figures sleeping in their blister packs for months. I wanted to start something a bit challenging on Flickr, and I had previously seen some awesome Star Wars toys pictures, and other "365" projects that I really liked,' he says. The two starring Stormtroopers — TK455 and TK479 — have run into cats, clocks, various household implements, and even a DeLorean sports car."

Sqwuzzy notes a judge's ruling in Spain that makes that country one of the most lenient in the world as respects sharing copyrighted material over P2P networks. "The entertainment industries in Spain must be progressively tearing their hair out in recent months as they experience setback after setback. ... After Spain virtually ruled out imposing a '3-strikes' regime for illicit file-sharers, the entertainment industries said they would target 200 BitTorrent sites instead. Now a judge has decided that sharing between users for no profit via P2P doesn't breach copyright laws and sites should be presumed innocent until proved otherwise." This ruling occurred in a pre-trial hearing; the case will still go to trial.

suraj.sun writes to tell us that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of security company Kaspersky in the recent case questioning their classification of Zango software as malware. "The court ruled that Kaspersky Lab, which classified online media company Zango's software as malware and 'protected' users from it accordingly, could not be held liable for any actions it took to manufacture and distribute the technical means to restrict Zango software's access to others, as Kaspersky Lab deemed it 'objectionable material.' Zango sued Kaspersky Lab to force the Company to reclassify Zango's programs as nonthreatening and to prevent Kaspersky Lab's security software from blocking Zango's potentially undesirable programs. In the precedent-setting ruling for the anti-malware industry, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed a lower court ruling that Kaspersky Lab is a provider of an 'interactive computer service' as defined in the Communications Decency Act of 1996 . Part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 states: 'No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of ... any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to [objectionable] material.'"

tsa writes "Ars Technica reports that 13 of the 23 members from the technical committee of the Norwegian standards body, the organization that manages technical standards for the country, have resigned because of the way the OOXML standardization was handled. We've previously discussed Norway's protest and ISO's rejection of other appeals. From the article: 'The standardization process for Microsoft's office format has been plagued with controversy. Critics have challenged the validity of its ISO approval and allege that procedural irregularities and outright misconduct marred the voting process in national standards bodies around the world. Norway has faced particularly close scrutiny because the country reversed its vote against approval despite strong opposition to the format by a majority of the members who participated in the technical committee.'"

overmars writes "After years of closely guarding the formula for its search algorithms, Google is opening up a little. The search engine company has kept its search formula a closely guarded secret for two reasons: competition and to prevent abuse, said Udi Manber, Google's vice president of engineering, search quality, in a post on the corporate blog. Manber said the blog post is the first part of a renewed effort at the company 'to open up a bit more than we have in the past.' Manber said the most famous part of Google's ranking algorithm is PageRank, an algorithm developed by Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. While PageRank is still in use, it is a 'part of a much larger system,' he said. 'Other parts include language models (the ability to handle phrases, synonyms, diacritics, spelling mistakes, and so on), query models (it's not just the language, it's how people use it today), time models (some queries are best answered with a 30-minutes old page, and some are better answered with a page that stood the test of time), and personalized models (not all people want the same thing),' he said."

bsk_cw writes "Although many Windows users intend to hold onto their copies of XP until it is pried from their cold, dead fingers, Microsoft fully intends to phase out the OS in favor of Vista. If you're unwilling to move to one of the alternatives, and really don't like Vista, the least you can do is be aware of what's in store. David DeJean offers a rundown on Microsoft's timeline for Windows XP, why the company does things that way, and what you can do about it."

Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) have built the world's first mode-locked silicon evanescent laser. But what is an 'evanescent' laser? It is a step toward 'combining lasers and other key optical components with the existing electronic capabilities in silicon.' In other words, this research work will provide a way to integrate optical and electronic functions on a single chip. As these evanescent lasers can produce stable short pulses of laser light, they will be useful for many optical applications, such as high-speed data transmission or highly accurate optical clocks."

An anonymous reader writes "News.com has an article on the announcement of Microsoft and Universal to introduce watermarking technology into audio files. The technology could serve several purposes including tracking file sharing statistics and inserting advertisements into audio tracks. The article goes on to suggest that watermarking could possibly replace DRM in the near future."

Irongeek_ADC writes with a first-person account from the The Chronicle of Higher Education by a university professor who was asked to stop using Tor. University IT and campus security staffers came knocking on Paul Cesarini's door asking why he was using the anonymizing network. They requested that he stop and also that he not teach his students about it. The visitors said it was likely against university policy (a policy they probably were not aware that Cesarini had helped to draft). The professor seems genuinely to appreciate the problems that a campus IT department faces; but in the end he took a stand for academic freedom.

The AP reports that the first anti-missile defense system has been installed for testing on a commercial jet, a FedEx cargo carrier. The system is intended to detect the launch of a shoulder-fired missile at takeoff or landing, and disable the missile with a laser beam. Sen. Barbara Baxter (D-California) is one of the supporters of the system. She and other members of Congress are hoping to equip all US commercial passenger liners with this system in 20 years, at a cost of billions of dollars. Is this good common sense or the costly future of a society hobbled by fear of terrorism?

Johan Louwers writes "The Viking mars mission in 1976 might have missed signs of life due to not completely working analysis equipment. GC-MS on the Viking 1976 Mars missions did not detect organic molecules on the Martian surface, even those expected from meteorite bombardment. This result suggested that the Martian regolith might hold a potent oxidant that converts all organic molecules to carbon dioxide rapidly relative to the rate at which they arrive. This conclusion is influencing the design of Mars missions. We reexamine this conclusion in light of what is known about the oxidation of organic compounds generally and the nature of organics likely to come to Mars via meteorite."

eldavojohn writes "In a brief article on CNet, a company named Coverity announced that Firefox is using software to detect flaws in Firefox's source code. Even more interesting is the DHS initiative for Coverity to use this same bug detection software on 40 open source projects." An interesting tidbit from the article: "Most of the 40 programs tested averaged less than one defect per thousand lines of code. The cleanest program was XMMS, a Unix-based multimedia application. It had only six bugs in its 116,899 lines of code, or .51 bugs per thousands lines of code. The buggiest program is the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver, or AMANDA, a Linux backup application first developed at the University of Maryland. Coverity found 108 bugs in its 88,950 lines of code, or about 1.214 bugs per thousand lines of code." We've covered this before, only now Firefox is actually licensing the Coverity software and using it directly.

An anonymous reader writes "The appearance of an ad-supported operating system is probably not that far off. This article takes a look at some of the finer points behind an OS which is financed with ad views, and more specifically the logic behind a free version of Windows which could make this a reality. There are a few issues which must be resolved first, but with Microsoft refining Windows Live and shifting some of their focus to advertising, many of the pieces seem to be falling into place."