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Items by Soulskill

Slashdot

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  Digital Distribution Numbers Speak To Health of PC Game Industry

  Posted: July 23rd, 2010, 1:14am MDT by Soulskill

  An anonymous reader writes with this quote from PC Authority: "Over the years many voices have declared PC gaming dead. We have seen developers abandon the platform for consoles, citing piracy as the cause. Game stores have slowly relegated PC games from prime shelf position to one tucked away in the back corner — even Microsoft dumped AAA PC game developers from the company. It seems, though, that the demise of the PC as a games platform has been exaggerated, because until very recently sales data ignored digital distribution, with the latest data released by US company NPD revealing that 48% of PC unit sales in the US in 2009 were digital. That translates to 21.3 million games downloaded in the US. Interestingly, although 48% of games were sold online, it only worked out as 36% of the revenue. This highlights the fact that it isn't just convenience that has PC gamers shopping online; it is also that games are generally cheaper than in stores."

  

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  New Oddworld Games In Development

  Posted: July 15th, 2010, 10:19pm MDT by Soulskill

  Game developer Just Add Water announced today that the Oddworld series, dormant since 2005, will be getting multiple new titles in the near future. Quoting: "... for the past 12 months we have been working extremely closely with the fantastic people at Oddworld Inhabitants, from what started off as brief discussions in June 2009, to now working on multiple projects, across multiple platforms. Whilst we cannot go into specifics right now, we can tell you that over the coming weeks and months we will be announcing these exciting projects starring all of your favorite Oddworld characters."

  

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  Hollywood Accounting — How Harry Potter Loses Money

  Posted: July 9th, 2010, 10:43am MDT by Soulskill

  An anonymous reader writes "Techdirt has the details on how it was possible for the last Harry Potter movie to lose $167 million while taking in nearly $1 billion in revenue. If you ever wanted to see 'Hollywood Accounting' in action, take a look. The article also notes two recent court decisions that may raise questions about Hollywood's ability to continue with these kinds of tricks. For example, the producers of 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire' now have to pay $270 million for its attempt to get around paying a partner through similar tricks."

  

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  Fan-Developed Ultima VI Remake Released

  Posted: July 9th, 2010, 4:39am MDT by Soulskill

  An anonymous reader writes "20 years after the original game launched, a fan-developed Ultima 6 remake has finally been released! The Ultima 6 Project was formed in 2001 by Sliding Dragon to develop a remake of Origin's Ultima VI: The False Prophet with newer graphics and a more immersive engine. Soon assembled under the banner Archon, the team members, who hail from all over the globe, have set about recreating the world of Britannia, adding an enhanced storyline to bolster intraseries continuity and building on the Ultima legacy in a way that will please fans new and old."

  

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  Where Are the Joysticks For Retro Gaming?

  Posted: July 9th, 2010, 1:12am MDT by Soulskill

  Doctor O writes "With all those nice emulators for classic gaming around (such as MAME, VICE or Stella) I want to establish monthly retro gaming evenings with some friends. The problem is I can't find any good joysticks for that purpose. There's a new version of the legendary Competition Pro, but judging from the many one-star reviews on Amazon, it's terrible. I found the USB version of the classic Atari Joystick, but it doesn't seem to be available and would have prohibitive shipping costs to Germany anyway. So, Slashdot to the rescue — where are the suitable USB joysticks for retro gaming?"

  

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  ESA's GOCE Satellite Provides Gravity Map of Earth

  Posted: June 28th, 2010, 4:29pm MDT by Soulskill

  kaulike writes "The European Space Agency's GOCE satellite, launched in March 2009, has provided a spectacular, highly detailed map of our favorite gravity well. This map shows the normalized surface of the earth as defined by gravity, showing the relative altitude differences from the average for each surveyed point. The article provides the helpful metaphor that a ball resting on this surface would not roll anywhere, even though there would be visual slopes, as gravity is equalized across the globe. There is a fascinating deep area in the Indian ocean (-100M) and a high area near Iceland (+80M), proving conclusively that our world is not homogeneous in terms of density (or practically any other measure). Does anyone know whether these anomalies correspond to known geographic phenomena? Deposits of heavy metals perhaps, or hotspots where the mantle is thinner? I know little about geodetic stuff, but I'm curious about the reasons for wrinkles in the data set."

  

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  Mozilla Updates Firefox To Appease FarmVille Users

  Posted: June 28th, 2010, 3:49pm MDT by Soulskill

  CWmike writes "Just three days after adding plug-in crash protection to Firefox, Mozilla rushed out another release because people playing FarmVille on Facebook complained that their browser was shutting down the game. Although complaints about Firefox's quick killing of hung plug-ins were not limited to FarmVille, that game was the squeaky wheel that got the update grease. 'A lot of people play FarmVille. To ignore those people for any length of time could have a significant effect on Firefox's share of browser users,' said Firefox user Jeff Rivett on Bugzilla Sunday. 'The problem already existed, but the perceived impact suddenly changed, giving it a much higher priority.'"

  

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  US Space Policy Update Urges International Cooperation

  Posted: June 28th, 2010, 3:08pm MDT by Soulskill

  eldavojohn writes "The recent shift in NASA's spaceflight goals has caused great stress in the space community and those related to efforts in space. A White House update to the policy is said to emphasize cooperation with the international community and looks to be a move away from individual nations competing in space. Instead, the document urges intense competition (PDF) in the commercial sector and reasons that 'The United States considers the sustainability, stability, and free access to, and use of, space vital to its national interests. It is the shared interest of all nations to act responsibly in ways that emphasize openness and transparency, and help prevent mishaps, misperceptions, and mistrust.' Space.com also notes that you can submit your comments and thoughts to the task force Obama appointed to determine new directions. No doubt this avoidance or departure from another Space Race will have a lot of people concerned that the US is out of the game."

  

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  King's Quest Fan Project The Silver Lining Is Back

  Posted: June 28th, 2010, 2:50pm MDT by Soulskill

  LoTonah writes "After eight years of development and a Cease & Desist from Vivendi, King's Quest fan project The Silver Lining is back in action. From the website: 'We are extremely happy to announce that our project, The Silver Lining, will definitely see the light of day! In a wonderful turn of events, Activision reached out to the Phoenix Online team a few months ago with a desire to revisit their decision regarding The Silver Lining. After negotiations, the C&D has been officially rescinded, and Phoenix Online has been granted a non-commercial license to release The Silver Lining! Our team is ecstatic about this, and as hard as we've worked for eight years, it's the tireless belief and support of you, our fans, that has made this possible.' The first episode of the project is due to be released on July 10."

  

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  Porn Industry Ready To Drop Flash

  Posted: June 28th, 2010, 2:28pm MDT by Soulskill

  An anonymous reader writes "Here's an interesting new angle to the ongoing Flash-HTML5 debate. Digital Playground, one of the major adult film studios, said it would drop Flash today if all browsers were HTML5-ready (*cough*, IE8, *cough*). The company's founder said, 'Flash brings everything to a crawl and has an impact on battery life. With HTML5, there is no reason to show our content in Flash.' Digital Playground also indicated that it does not expect 3-D to gain mass acceptance any time soon."

  

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  Leaked MS Presentation Shows App Store Plans For Windows 8

  Posted: June 28th, 2010, 1:45pm MDT by Soulskill

  FrankNFurter sends word of an internal Microsoft presentation leaked online today that contains details about Windows 8. The slides mention support for 3-D displays, connectivity upgrades, rapid startup times, and an integrated application store. Quoting Neowin: "Consumers will be able to search on the web or locally on a Windows 8 machine to access applications from the store. Microsoft also details plans for application developers to help reach millions of users. One of the goals is to ensure licensing and monetization for developers is flexible with a transparent on-boarding process. It's clear that the 'Windows Store' will be a software service Microsoft provides and hosts fully in the cloud. The company will likely build the distribution model on Windows Azure to lure application developers."

  

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  Obama To Nearly Double the Available Broadband Wireless Spectrum

  Posted: June 28th, 2010, 1:06pm MDT by Soulskill

  suraj.sun tips news that the Obama administration announced today plans to free up roughly 500MHz of the wireless spectrum for commercial broadband. From the Washington Post: "The commitment backs a proposal by the Federal Communications Commission to auction off broadcasters' and government spectrum to commercial carriers that envision their networks running home appliances, automobile applications, tablet computers and other wireless devices. White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers said in a speech outlining the president's plan that freeing up more spectrum will spur economic growth through auctions of the airwaves and investment in wireless networks and technology. ... The FCC has proposed that 280 megahertz of spectrum come from broadcasters and other sources, 120 of which would come from broadcasters. The other 220 megahertz would come from the federal government's holdings managed by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration."

  

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  iOS Update May Tackle iPhone 4's Antenna Problems

  Posted: June 28th, 2010, 11:41am MDT by Soulskill

  DJRumpy was one of several readers to point out rumors that Apple will soon be deploying an update to iOS 4 to combat the iPhone 4 antenna problems we discussed last week. This could be good news for users of the 1.7 million iPhone 4s purchased during the first three days of its release. (And no, Daily Mail, Steve didn't announce a recall, though there's speculation that this problem could be a boon for Android.) An anonymous reader notes an analysis of a teardown of the phone, which found that its parts collectively cost about $188, with the most expensive part — the LCD screen — costing $28.50 by itself. In other Apple news, Germany has demanded that the company "immediately make clear" what data it collects from customers, and what use it makes of that data (perhaps spurred by Google's Wi-Fi sniffing debacle).

  

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  UK Video Game Tax Cuts Sabotaged?

  Posted: June 28th, 2010, 12:20am MDT by Soulskill

  ninjacheeseburger writes "Develop recently published an article claiming that the UK government was put under pressure by one of the biggest game companies in the world to cancel planned tax breaks for video game developers. This company had apparently viewed game tax relief as a measure that would have given the UK an unfair advantage over other nations."

  

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  Porting Lemmings In 36 Hours

  Posted: June 27th, 2010, 9:26pm MDT by Soulskill

  An anonymous reader writes "Aaron Ardiri challenged himself to port his classic PalmOS version of Lemmings to the iPhone, Palm Pre, Mac and Windows. The porting was done using his own dev environment, which creates native C versions of the game. He liveblogged the whole thing, and finished after only 36 hours with an iPhone version and a Palm Pre version awaiting submission, and free versions for Windows and Mac available on his site."

  

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  Security For Open Source Web Projects?

  Posted: June 27th, 2010, 11:28am MDT by Soulskill

  PoissonPilote writes "I'm currently developing a multi-player, browser-based game, using the good old HTML, JavaScript, PHP & MySQL combination. Progress is good so far, and the number of players is slowly but steadily increasing. At the beginning of the project, I decided to put the entirety of my game under the MIT license, so that anyone could study the code or even start their own server for the game. However, with the increasing popularity of my project, I am starting to worry about security issues. Even though I consider myself decent at web development and am pretty sure I'm not making any classic mistakes (SQL injection, cross-site scripting, URL forgery, etc.), I am no web security expert. I didn't find any relevant examples to compare my game to, as most open source games are written in a compiled language, and no web server is at stake in those cases. Some web developer friends told me not to release the source code at all; others told me to release it only when the game will be shut down. Naturally, I'm not satisfied by either of these solutions. What approach would you recommend?"

  

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  ICANN Approves .xxx Suffix For Porn Websites

  Posted: June 27th, 2010, 10:08am MDT by Soulskill

  An anonymous reader tips news that ICANN has officially approved the creation of a .xxx suffix for porn sites, confirming the rumors we discussed on Thursday. While this resolves a 10-year debate on the subject, the Guardian notes that "many pornography companies are unhappy with the idea of a dedicated space online because they expect that as soon as .xxx is implemented, conservative members of the US Congress will lobby to make any sex-related website re-register there and remove itself from other domains such as .com or .org." Others are more confident, like Stuart Lawley of ICM Registry, the company sponsoring the new TLD. "Mr. Lawley said more than 100,000 domains had preregistered. He said he expected that when the dot-xxx domains opened for business, nine to 12 months from now, some 500,000 domains would register, or roughly 10 percent of the five million to six million adult online sites."

  

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  MIT Says Natural Gas Best To Lower Carbon Emissions

  Posted: June 27th, 2010, 8:47am MDT by Soulskill

  eldavojohn writes "This week MIT released a comprehensive, hundred-page report entitled 'The Future of Natural Gas' that outlined the many scenarios the United States faces when aiming to reduce carbon emissions. From the NY Times recap: 'The scenario goes like this, according to MIT: Nuclear power, renewable energy and carbon capture and sequestration are relatively expensive next to gas. Conventional coal is no longer a major source of power generation in the United States. "Natural gas is the substantial winner in the electric sector: The substitution effect, mainly gas generation for coal generation, outweighs the demand reduction effect."' Will this urging help to produce a policy shift from renewable energy (like wind) to natural gas for the United States?"

  

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  BBC To Create Internet Protocol TV Standard

  Posted: June 27th, 2010, 7:30am MDT by Soulskill

  Robadob sends word that the BBC has been granted approval for Project Canvas, "a partnership between the BBC, ITV, BT, Five, Channel 4, and TalkTalk to develop a so-called Internet Protocol Television standard." The approval came with several interesting requirements: "Project Canvas must always remain free-to-air but users 'may be charged for additional pay services that third parties might choose to provide via the Canvas platform, for example video on demand services, as well as the broadband subscription fees.' Access to Project Canvas must not be 'bundled with other products or services' and 'listing on the electronic program guide will be awarded in a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory manner." In addition, a preliminary draft of the tech specs for the project must be published within 20 working days, in order to allow broadcasters and manufacturers of set-top boxes to adopt the new standards. Significantly, "Other broadcasters and content providers must have access to the platform."

  

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  The Fastest ISPs In the US

  Posted: June 26th, 2010, 11:27am MDT by Soulskill

  adeelarshad82 writes "PCMag recently put Internet browsing speeds to the test to see which ISP was the fastest. The results were based on a quarter million tests run between May 1, 2009, and April 30, 2010, by more than 6,000 users. The tests were carried out using SurfSpeed, which takes into account the complete, real-world download time of a web page to a browser. According to the results, Verizon's FiOS took the top spot as the nation's fastest ISP, with a SurfSpeed score of 1.23 Mbps. Interestingly though, of all the regions where Verizon's FiOS is available, its dominance is only seen in the northeast and the west, whereas cable service from Cox and Comcast won out in the southern region. Moreover, cable through Cox and Optimum Online beat AT&T's fiber optic service in the nationwide results, with SurfSpeeds of 1.14Mbps, 1.12Mbps, and 1.06Mbps respectively. The worst results mostly consisted of DSL providers, bottoming out at 544 Kbps from Frontier and going up to 882Kbps by Earthlink. Other interesting facts noted in the test were that broadband penetration was highest in Rhode Island and lowest in Mississippi, while the average Internet bill was highest in Delaware and lowest in Arkansas."

  

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  Reporters Without Borders Fight Web Censorship

  Posted: June 26th, 2010, 10:24am MDT by Soulskill

  eldavojohn writes "Yesterday Reporters Without Borders (RSF) launched a new initiative called 'Anti-Censorship Shelter' that aims to provide shelter for bloggers and Internet journalists in foreign countries who risk persecution or censorship from their local governments. RSF stated, 'At a time when online filtering and surveillance is becoming more and more widespread, we are making an active commitment to an Internet that is unrestricted and accessible to all by providing the victims of censorship with the means of protecting their online information. Never before have there been so many netizens in prison in countries such as China, Vietnam, and Iran for expressing their views freely online. Anonymity is becoming more and more important for those who handle sensitive data.' Working with Xerobank, RSF has a high-speed, devoted VPN that users can connect to that sounds like an onion router. While RSF admitted this masked address service is not foolproof, it's impressive to see an organization proactively seeking out individuals and offering them a digital shelter to protect themselves from a fate similar to that of the estimated 120 imprisoned bloggers around the world."

  

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  Open Source Geographic Tracking?

  Posted: June 26th, 2010, 9:20am MDT by Soulskill

  Walkingshark writes "I work for a company that needs to track people and equipment across the US as they move to, work on, and leave jobs. The boss has been looking at the typical mix of closed, proprietary software and has also considered building off our existing 10-year-old SQL database (with the kind of clunky interface you'd expect from a program built in the late '90s). I'd like to be able to bring him a good open source alternative, but so far I haven't been able to find anything that can do what we need. Ultimately, we need to be able to keep track of a few thousand separate people and pieces of equipment, and to move them in dynamically created groups to and from our locations and jobsites in a way that is sharable between workstations, with updates to location entered at one station being broadcast to all clients in real time. Ideally, this program needs to also give us access to road routing similar to the capability found on Google Maps. We'd doubtless need to be able to modify the source for customization, but I was hoping there was something we could find out there that had the core functionality we're looking for."

  

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  Creative Commons Responds To ASCAP Letter

  Posted: June 26th, 2010, 8:18am MDT by Soulskill

  An anonymous reader writes "Drew Wilson at ZeroPaid has a followup to the story about ASCAP telling its members that organizations like EFF and Creative Commons are undermining copyright. A spokesperson from Creative Commons said, 'It's very sad that ASCAP is falsely claiming that Creative Commons works to undermine copyright. Creative Commons licenses are copyright licenses — plain and simple, without copyright, these tools don't even work.' He also said, 'Many tens of thousands of musicians, including acts like Nine Inch Nails, the Beastie Boys, David Byrne, Radiohead, and Snoop Dogg, have used Creative Commons licenses to share with the public.' Many ASCAP members are already expressing their disappointment with the ASCAP letter over at Mind the Gap. Sounds like ASCAP will be in damage control for a while."

  

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  White House Unveils Plans For "Trusted Identities In Cyberspace"

  Posted: June 26th, 2010, 7:14am MDT by Soulskill

  Presto Vivace writes with news that the Obama administration's cyber-security coordinater, Howard Schmidt, yesterday unveiled a national plan for "trusted" online identities. Schmidt wrote, "The NSTIC, which is in response to one of the near term action items in the President’s Cyberspace Policy Review, calls for the creation of an online environment, or an Identity Ecosystem as we refer to it in the strategy, where individuals and organizations can complete online transactions with confidence, trusting the identities of each other and the identities of the infrastructure that the transaction runs on. For example, no longer should individuals have to remember an ever-expanding and potentially insecure list of usernames and passwords to login into various online services. Through the strategy we seek to enable a future where individuals can voluntarily choose to obtain a secure, interoperable, and privacy-enhancing credential (e.g., a smart identity card, a digital certificate on their cell phone, etc.) from a variety of service providers — both public and private — to authenticate themselves online for different types of transactions (e.g., online banking, accessing electronic health records, sending email, etc.)." You can read the full draft of the plan (PDF), and the White House is seeking public comments on it as well.

  

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  BP Robot Seriously Hampers Oil Spill Containment

  Posted: June 25th, 2010, 4:50pm MDT by Soulskill

  ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "A high-tech effort by BP to slow the oil gushing from its ruptured well head led to a large accident yesterday that forced the company to remove a vital containment cap for 10 hours. Robots, known as remote operated vehicles, were performing multiple operations at the disaster site when one bumped into the 'top hat' cap and damaged one of the vents that removes excess fluid, according to the US Coast Guard. The robots weigh around four tons, and are controlled from vessels on the surface using advanced IT systems with both manual and automated functions. BP removed the cap for nearly 10 hours ... in order to assess it after a discharge of liquids was noted from a key valve. The cap's removal left the oil gushing out of the wellhead, largely uninterrupted. Admiral Thad Allen, US National Incident Commander for the response, told the media that part of the problem was the number of robots conducting simultaneous operations at an immense depth. A dozen robots are circulating the wellhead." Another factor that may hinder containment even more is the increasing potential for tropical storms in that area of the Gulf.

  

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  Experts Explain iPhone 4 Antenna Problem

  Posted: June 25th, 2010, 4:08pm MDT by Soulskill

  CWmike writes "Reports of call and data signal strength problems in the new iPhone 4 have a basis in fact, a hardware expert said Thursday. Later in the day, Apple acknowledged that holding the iPhone 4 may result in a diminished signal that could make it difficult to make and maintain calls or retain a data connection. 'Gripping any phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone,' Apple said in a statement issued to several media outlets, including PC Magazine, which had run tests earlier Thursday. 'If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases.' Scores of new iPhone owners confirmed the reception problem in a string of more than 360 messages posted to a thread on Apple's iPhone 4 support forum." A blog post from an antenna design company explains that the reception problems are probably the direct result of phone design adapting to FCC requirements.

  

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  Hemisphere Games Reveals Osmos Linux Sales Numbers

  Posted: June 25th, 2010, 3:45pm MDT by Soulskill

  An anonymous reader writes "Hemisphere Games analyzes the sales numbers for their Linux port of Osmos and ask themselves, 'Is it worth porting games to Linux?' The short, simple answer is 'yes.' Breakdown and details in the post." A few other interesting details: the port took them about two man-months of work, the day they released for Linux was their single best sales day ever, and they got a surprising amount of interest from Russia and Eastern Europe. Their data only reflects sales through their website, and they make the point that "the lack of a strong Linux portal makes it a much less 'competitive' OS for commercial development." Hopefully someday the rumored Steam Linux client will help to solve that.

  

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  
  

  
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  ASCAP Declares War On Free Culture, EFF

  Posted: June 25th, 2010, 3:23pm MDT by Soulskill

  Andorin writes "According to Drew Wilson at ZeroPaid and Cory Doctorow, the ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), a US organization that aims to collect royalties for its members for the use of their copyrighted works, has begun soliciting donations to fight key organizations of the free culture movement, such as Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Public Knowledge. According to a letter received by ASCAP member Mike Rugnetta, 'Many forces including Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, Electronic Frontier Foundation and technology companies with deep pockets are mobilizing to promote "Copyleft" in order to undermine our "Copyright." They say they are advocates of consumer rights, but the truth is these groups simply do not want to pay for the use of our music. Their mission is to spread the word that our music should be free.' (Part 1 and part 2 of the letter.) The collecting agency is asking that its professional members donate to its Legislative Fund for the Arts, which appears to be a lobbying campaign meant to convince Congress that artists should not have the choice of licensing their works under a copyleft license."

  

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  A Quantum Memory Storage Prototype

  Posted: June 25th, 2010, 2:40pm MDT by Soulskill

  eldavojohn writes "An Australian National University project has completed a proof-of-concept storage unit that relies on bringing light to a standstill inside a crystal and then releasing it later for a read-once storage device. There are a few complexities to work out, such as the -270 degrees Celsius requirement to stop the light. And there is an interesting side effect noted by the team lead: 'We could entangle the quantum state of two memories, that is, two crystals. According to quantum mechanics, reading out one memory will instantly alter what is stored in the other, no matter how large the distance between them. According to relativity, the way time passes for one memory is affected by how it moves. With a good quantum memory, an experiment to measure how these fundamental effects interact could be as simple as putting one crystal in the back of my car and going for a drive.' Hopefully this will lead to a better understanding and simple testing of quantum entanglement."

  

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  Arlington National Cemetery's Many IT Flaws

  Posted: June 25th, 2010, 1:56pm MDT by Soulskill

  imac.usr writes "A story in today's Washington Post calls to light the utter failure of the nation's most sacred final resting place to modernize its pen-and-paper record system. According to the story, the cemetery's administrators have spent $5 million without managing to accomplish the seemingly simple task of creating a database record of the site's graves. As Virginia senator Mark Warner points out, 'We are one fire, or one flood, or one spilled Starbucks coffee away from some of those records being lost or spoiled.'"

  

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  Stem Cells Curing Burn-Induced Blindness

  Posted: June 25th, 2010, 1:37pm MDT by Soulskill

  mcgrew writes "The AP (via Yahoo) is reporting that Italian researchers can now cure blindness caused by chemical burns using the patient's own stem cells. 'The treatment worked completely in 82 of 107 eyes and partially in 14 others, with benefits lasting up to a decade so far. One man whose eyes were severely damaged more than 60 years ago now has near-normal vision.' Previously, this kind of injury needed either a corneal transplant or stem cells from someone else, both of which are plagued by problems with tissue rejection. Unfortunately, this only works for damaged corneas — so far."

  

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  Pakistan To Scour Google, Yahoo For Blasphemy

  Posted: June 25th, 2010, 1:14pm MDT by Soulskill

  sv_libertarian sends in this excerpt from an AP report: "Pakistan will start monitoring seven major websites, including Google, Yahoo, and Amazon, for sacrilegious content, while blocking 17 other, lesser-known sites it deems offensive to Muslims, an official said Friday. The moves follow Pakistan's temporary ban imposed on Facebook in May that drew both praise and condemnation in a country that has long struggled to figure out how strict a version of Islam it should follow. ... 'If any particular link with offensive content appears on these websites, the (link) shall be blocked immediately without disturbing the main website,' [said Pakistan Telecommunication Authority spokesman Khurram Mehran]."

  

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  Researchers Create Lung On a Chip

  Posted: June 25th, 2010, 12:31pm MDT by Soulskill

  ElectricSteve writes "Utilizing human lung and blood vessel cells, researchers have created a device mounted on a microchip that mimics a living, breathing human lung. About the size of a rubber eraser, the device was developed by a team from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, and Children's Hospital Boston. Because it's translucent, researchers can watch the processes taking place inside of it — something that's difficult to do with an actual lung. It will be used for testing the respiratory effects of environmental toxins, aerosolized therapeutics, and new drugs. Using conventional models, such tests can cost more than $2 million."

  

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  Experts Say Wiretap Law Needs Digital Era Update

  Posted: June 25th, 2010, 11:50am MDT by Soulskill

  GovTechGuy writes "Experts at a Congressional hearing Thursday said the government needs to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act to reflect changes in technology, notably location-based services. On one hand, legal experts argue tracking a mobile user's location should require a higher burden of proof than simply intercepting their communications. On the other hand, first responders may need location data in order to save lives and respond to 911 calls. Either way, expect legislation from the committee later this year."

  

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  APB To Use In-Game Audio Advertisements

  Posted: June 25th, 2010, 6:26am MDT by Soulskill

  Rock, Paper, Shotgun reports that upcoming action MMOG APB: All Points Bulletin will use in-game audio advertisements as part of its business model. The number of ads you hear will be limited: "you'll only hear an ad when you go into a new zone, and that's only once every three hours." Nevertheless, some gamers are upset that these ads will be included on top of APB's already unusual payment plans. The game is set for release next Tuesday. Producer Jesse Knapp says of Realtime Worlds' goals for APB, "We looked at other online action games, and we saw things we felt could be better. Only 12 to 32 players in a match, bad connection due to peer-to-peer, dead cities, way too much time in lobbies, things like that. So what we set out to do was to make a game that has that online player vs. player action game experience in a large city with other players around, no lobbies, dynamic matchmaking, dedicated servers, great experience, and that's been one of the driving factors of APB from the very beginning." CVG recently previewed the game.

  

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  Civ 5 Will Let You Import and Convert Civ 4 Maps

  Posted: June 25th, 2010, 4:22am MDT by Soulskill

  bbretterson writes "From an interview Bitmob conducted with Civilization 5 Lead Designer Jon Shafer: 'You can import Civ 4 maps into the world builder and convert them into Civ 5 maps, including all the units and cities and stuff on it — the conversion process will just do that for you automatically. We're hoping that the first week Civ 5 is out, people will use that function and port all of the Civ 4 stuff over to Civ 5, so everything will be out there already.'"

  

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  New Xbox 360 S Uses Less Power, Makes Less Noise

  Posted: June 24th, 2010, 4:32am MDT by Soulskill

  Vigile writes "Microsoft unveiled a new Xbox 360 S console at E3 this month, and without delay the new machine has been dissected and tested. The most dramatic change is the move to a single-chip CPU/GPU hybrid processor that is apparently being built on the 45nm process technology from GlobalFoundries, AMD's spun-off production facilities. With the inclusion of the new processor, the Xbox 360 S uses much less power (about 30-40%) compared to previous generation machines, and also turns out to be much quieter as a result of a single, larger fan. This article has photographic evidence of the teardown, with comparisons between this Valhalla platform and the older Falcon system, along with videos of the reconstruction process and noise comparisons." The new console also takes measures to protect itself from overheating, so RRoDs shouldn't be a problem with this revision.

  

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  Nintendo 3DS GPU Revealed

  Posted: June 24th, 2010, 2:01am MDT by Soulskill

  An anonymous reader writes "The GPU for the Nintendo 3DS has just been revealed, and it's not made by Nvidia, ATI, or even Imagination Technologies. Instead, Nintendo has signed up Japanese startup Digital Media Professionals (DMP) in a deal that sees the company's PICA200 chip churning out the 3-D visuals. For the first time in Nintendo's history, the 3DS will feature a GPU with programmable shaders, rather than a fixed-function pipeline, meaning the 3DS is more graphically versatile than the Wii. Among the PICA200's features are 2x anti-aliasing, per-pixel lighting, subdivision primitives, and soft shadows. As well as featuring DMP's own 'Maestro' extensions, the PICA200 also fully supports OpenGL ES 1.1. The architecture supports four programmable vertex units and up to four pixel pipelines."

  

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  New Wii Menu Update Targets Homebrew Again

  Posted: June 23rd, 2010, 4:29am MDT by Soulskill

  Nintendo has tried to block homebrew during firmware updates in the past, often unsuccessfully. Now, as it rolls out version 4.3 of the Wii System Menu, stopping homebrew modifications once again seems to be its primary goal. From Nintendo's support site: "Because unauthorized channels or firmware may impair game play or the Wii console, updating to Wii Menu version 4.3 will check for and automatically remove such unauthorized files." Since it's hard to bill that as an upgrade, they vaguely add, "In addition, there are some behind the scenes enhancements that do not affect any prominently-used features or menus but will improve system performance."

  

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  UK Video Game Tax Relief Cancelled

  Posted: June 23rd, 2010, 1:49am MDT by Soulskill

  Stoobalou writes "UK game developers have just been dealt a financial blow by Chancellor George Osborne in his first budget, which sees the coalition government scrapping the video game tax relief plans promised by Labour. In his speech today, Osborne simply said the 'planned tax relief for the video games industry will be cancelled.' According to the government's budget report, the cancellation of video game tax relief will save the government £40 million in the 2011-2012 financial year, and a further £50 million in each subsequent year."

  

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  Is LGP Going the Way of Loki Software?

  Posted: June 22nd, 2010, 11:04pm MDT by Soulskill

  An anonymous reader writes "After the demise of Loki Software, Linux Game Publishing sprouted up in its place, and for the past nine years has ported a number of games to Linux. But LGP may now be sharing the same fate as Loki. Linux Game Publishing hasn't updated its blog or news pages in months, has stopped responding to e-mails, and its only active ports are games they began work on in 2002/2003."

  

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  Preserving Virtual Worlds

  Posted: June 22nd, 2010, 2:04am MDT by Soulskill

  The Opposable Thumbs blog has an interview with Jerome McDonough of the University of Illinois, who is involved with the Preserving Virtual Worlds project. The goal of the project is to recognize video games as cultural artifacts and to make sure they're accessible by future generations. Here McDonough talks about some of the technical difficulties in doing so: "Take, for example, Star Raiders on the Atari 2600. If you're going to preserve this, you've got a couple of problems. The first is that it is on a cartridge that is designed to work on a particular system that is no longer manufactured. And as long as you've got a hardware dependency there, you're really not going to be able to preserve this material very long. What we have been looking at is how feasible is it for things that fundamentally all have some level of hardware dependency there — even Doom has dependencies on DLLs with an operating system, and on particular chipsets and architectures for playing. How do you take that and turn it into something that isn't as dependent on a particular physical piece of hardware. And to do that, you need information about that platform. You need technical specifications that allow you to basically reproduce a virtualization that may enable you to run the software in its original form in the future. So what we're trying to do is preserve not only the games, but preserve the knowledge that you would need to create a virtualization platform to play the game."

  

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  States Launch Joint Probe of Google Wi-Fi Snooping

  Posted: June 21st, 2010, 4:32pm MDT by Soulskill

  CWmike writes "As many as 30 states could join an investigation into Google's collection of personal information from unprotected wireless networks, Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal announced today. Google's response was similar to what it said earlier this month: 'It was a mistake for us to include code in our software that collected payload data, but we believe we didn't break any US laws. We're working with the relevant authorities to answer their questions and concerns.' Google already faces investigations by privacy authorities in several European countries, including the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. In the US, Google faces multiple civil lawsuits, and the company has been asked for more information from several congressmen as a preliminary step to a legislative hearing. Google has asked that the lawsuits be consolidated and moved to a California federal court's jurisdiction."

  

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  Special Master Appointed In Jammie Thomas Case

  Posted: June 21st, 2010, 3:47pm MDT by Soulskill

  NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "There has been another odd development in the Jammie Thomas-Rassett case. You may recall that after the judge reduced the RIAA's verdict from $1.92 million to $54,000 on the grounds that $54,000 was the maximum amount a jury could reasonably award, the RIAA opted for a third trial instead of allowing judgment to be entered. Its reasoning in making that call has never been clear, since there seemed little point in spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a trial which could produce no more than a judgment for $54,000 or less. Apparently the court thinks taxpayers' money could be better spent, and has appointed a 'Special Master' to bring about 'meaningful settlement discussions,' with the Master's $400-per-hour fee to be paid by the RIAA. One commentator suggests the RIAA should at this juncture just say, 'Thanks Jammie, we've had all we can get out of you and caused you enough grief — pay us $1 and we'll forget about it.' Actually doing that would be a lot less costly and more reasonable that what they appear to have in mind."

  

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  Why Engineers Don't Like Twitter

  Posted: June 21st, 2010, 3:04pm MDT by Soulskill

  PabloSandoval48 writes, "A recent EE Times survey of 285 engineers found that 85% don't use Twitter. More than half indicated that the statement 'I don't really care what you had for breakfast' best sums up their feelings about it." Reader mattnyc99 notes a related article in which the authors analyzed the content of tweets during a recent World Cup game, finding 76% of them to be useless. "Out of 1,000 tweets with the #worldcup hashtag during the game, only 16 percent were legitimate news and 7.6 percent were deemed 'legitimate conversation' — which leaves 6 percent spam, 24 percent self-promotion, about 17 percent re-tweets, and a whopping 29 percent of useless observation (like this). Is the mainstream media making too big a deal out of the avalanche of World Cup tweets, or is the world literally flooding the zone?"

  

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  VLC 1.1 Forced To Drop Shoutcast Due To AOL Anti-OSS Provision

  Posted: June 21st, 2010, 2:18pm MDT by Soulskill

  The folks over at VideoLAN are in the process of releasing version 1.1.0 of VLC, and one of the major changes is the removal of SHOUTcast, a media-streaming module from AOL-owned Nullsoft. "During the last year, the VLC developers have received several injunctions by e-mail from employees at AOL, asking us to either comply to a license not compatible with free software or remove the SHOUTcast capability in VLC." Within the license is a clause prohibiting the distribution of SHOUTcast with any product whose own license requires that it be "disclosed or distributed in source code form," "licensed for the purpose of making derivative works," or "redistributable at no charge." The license would also force VideoLAN to bundle Nullsoft adware with VLC. Update: 06/22 00:52 GMT by H : The 1.1 release is ready from their site; you can also read up on the release information.

  

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  1000 Genomes Project Releases Pilot Genome Data

  Posted: June 21st, 2010, 1:35pm MDT by Soulskill

  eldavojohn writes "Three pilot projects have been completed for the 1000 Genomes Project and as a result, the pilot data has been released. This makes the data of nearly 700 people available for analysis via FTP (Americas mirror, European mirror). Dr. Eric D. Green of the National Human Genome Research Institute said, 'The 1000 Genomes project has a simple goal: peer more deeply into the genetic variations of the human genome to understand the genetic contribution to common human diseases. I am excited about the progress being made on this resource for use by scientists around the world and look forward to seeing what we learn from the next stage of the project.' There's not a whole lot of information on their site about this data, but the repositories have many readme files explaining the data layout."

  

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  Groups Urge FCC To Block NBC-Comcast Merger

  Posted: June 21st, 2010, 12:50pm MDT by Soulskill

  GovTechGuy writes "A coalition of media companies, labor groups and privacy advocates have combined to urge the FCC to block the proposed merger of NBC Universal and cable giant Comcast. In a letter sent to the FCC Monday (PDF), the groups argue the new $30 billion entity would have unprecedented control over the media landscape, raising antitrust concerns. Among the threats listed are the potential for the new media giant to violate net neutrality and favor its own content both on television and online."

  

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  Why Mobile Innovation Outpaces PC Innovation

  Posted: June 21st, 2010, 12:07pm MDT by Soulskill

  Sandrina sends in an opinion piece from TechCrunch that discusses why mobile systems are developing so much faster than the PC market. The article credits Intel with allowing hardware innovation to stagnate, and points out how much more competitive the component vendor market is for smartphones. Quoting: "In PCs, Intel dictates the pace of hardware releases — OEMs essentially wait for CPU updates, then differentiate through inventory control, channel / distribution and branding. Intel and Microsoft win no matter which PC makers excel — they literally don't care if it's Asus, Dell or HP. In the smartphone world, it's the opposite. Dozens of component vendors fight each other to the death to win designs at smartphone OEMs. This competitive dynamic forms an entirely different basis for how component vendors approach system integration and support. Consider Infineon, which supplies the 3G wireless chipset in the iPhone. In order to stay in Apple's graces, Infineon must do everything necessary to help the hardware and software play well together, including staffing permanent engineers in Cupertino or sending a team overnight from Germany. Do you think Intel does this for Dell?"

  

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  VPN Flaw Shows Users' IP Addresses

  Posted: June 21st, 2010, 11:22am MDT by Soulskill

  AHuxley writes "A VPN flaw announced at the Telecomix Cyphernetics Assembly in Sweden allows individual users to be identified. 'The flaw is caused by a combination of IPv6, which is a new Internet protocol due to replace the current IPv4, and PPTP (point-to-point tunneling protocol)-based VPN services, which are the most widely used. ... The flaw means that the IP address of a user hiding behind a VPN can still be found, thanks to the connection broadcasting information that can be used to identify it. It's also relatively easy to find a MAC address (which identifies a particular device) and a computer's name on the network that it's on.' The Swedish anti-piracy bureau could already be gathering data using the exploit."

  

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  Utah Attorney General Tweets Execution Order

  Posted: June 20th, 2010, 11:58am MDT by Soulskill

  Kilrah_il writes "In an all-time low for Internet use, Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff used Twitter to announce to the public his approval of the execution of convicted murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner. 'I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner's execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims,' the attorney general wrote. The AG's 7,000 followers retweeted the message further on and soon many replied concerning the awfulness of tweeting the execution of a human being. 'Mr. Shurtleff was doing nothing unusual; politicians and news organizations now routinely send out tweets to alert people to the latest developments. But as Twitter users digested endless breaking news flashes alerting them to the death of a man by firing squad in the United States, for some Mr. Shurtleff's remarks stood out from the rest.'"

  

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  AU National Broadband Network Signs $11 Billion Deal With Telstra

  Posted: June 20th, 2010, 10:45am MDT by Soulskill

  An anonymous reader writes "The Australian government has signed an $11 billion deal with the country's largest telco, Telstra, to acquire the telco's physical infrastructure and migrate customers to the National Broadband Network. The NBN is a 100Mbps open access fiber network that will be rolled out to 94% of the Australian population, with wireless and satellite to cover the remainder. The deal marks a large step forward for the new network, as without a deal to bring Telstra's customers onboard, the NBN's viability was in question."

  

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  Made-For-Torrents Sci-Fi Drama "Pioneer One" Debuts

  Posted: June 20th, 2010, 9:32am MDT by Soulskill

  QuantumG writes "The first episode of the new science fiction drama Pioneer One has debuted and it looks like a hit. The pilot was shot for just $6,000, raised through the micro-funding platform Kickstarter, and the production is being supported through donations on the show's website. Donations can be made on a sliding scale with 'bonus' rewards for each level, such as an mp3 of the opening theme and deleted scenes. The show is being distributed through file-sharing systems such as BitTorrent and LimeWire thanks to VODO, the group who also helped produce it. Is this the future of television?"

  

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  Made-For-Torrents Sci-Fi Drama "Pioneer One" Debuts

  Posted: June 20th, 2010, 9:32am MDT by Soulskill

  QuantumG writes "The first episode of the new science fiction drama Pioneer One has debuted and it looks like a hit. The pilot was shot for just $6,000, raised through the micro-funding platform Kickstarter, and the production is being supported through donations on the show's website. Donations can be made on a sliding scale with 'bonus' rewards for each level, such as an MP3 of the opening theme and deleted scenes. The show is being distributed through file-sharing systems such as BitTorrent and LimeWire thanks to VODO, the group that also helped produce it. Is this the future of television?"

  

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  Verizon Makes Offering Service Blocks a Fireable Offense

  Posted: June 20th, 2010, 8:27am MDT by Soulskill

  Presto Vivace sends in a report from David Pogue at the New York Times, who learned from a Verizon customer service representative that the company has implemented a policy of punishing employees who suggest certain service blocks to customers looking to avoid unwanted or accidental fees. According to the representative, offering (for example) a web access block or premium SMS block without the customer asking for it can now lead to a reprimand or outright termination. The CSRs have also been directed to avoid issuing credits for such charges. "Essentially, we are to upsell customers on the $9.99 25mb/month or $29.99 unlimited packages for customers. Customers are not to be credited for charges unless they ask for the credit. And in cases such as data or premium SMS, where the occurrences may have gone months without the consumer noticing, only an initial credit can be issued."

  

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  Better Development Through Competition?

  Posted: June 20th, 2010, 7:20am MDT by Soulskill

  theodp writes "Among the tips Derek Sivers offers for how to hire a programmer to make your ideas happen is an intriguing one: hire more than one person to complete your first programming milestone, with the expectation that one will go bad, one will be so-so, and one will be great. 'Yes it means you're paying multiple times for this first milestone,' says Sivers, 'but it's worth it to find a good one.' It's not a new idea — the practice of pitting two different programmers against each other on the same task was noted three decades ago in Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine — but one that never gained widespread acceptance. Should the programming code-off be adopted as a software development best practice?"

  

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  SpaceX Falcon 9 Relatively Cheap Compared To NASA's New Pad

  Posted: June 19th, 2010, 11:27am MDT by Soulskill

  An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Motherboard.tv: "As debate over the future of spaceflight rages on — and as the axe all but falls on NASA's mission back to the moon and beyond — the successful launch of SpaceX's Falcon 9 two weeks ago proved at least one of the virtues of the private option: it's a heckuva lot cheaper than government-funded rides to space. In fact, the whole system was built for less than the cost of the service tower that was to be used for NASA's proposed future spaceflight vehicle (yup, the service tower is finished, but the rocket isn't, and the whole program may well be canceled anyway)." CEO Elon Musk spoke recently about some of the ways SpaceX finds to cut costs in the construction of their rockets.

  

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  Struggling To Bridge the Casual-Hardcore Game Gap

  Posted: June 19th, 2010, 10:19am MDT by Soulskill

  With the advent of the Wii and the upcoming motion control systems from Sony and Microsoft, console makers are expanding the gaming population to include vast numbers of casual players. Their problem now, according to this editorial at Eurogamer, is that there doesn't exist a broad selection of games between the simple, introductory titles and the complex, hardcore ones, which tends to limit how deep new players will venture into the gaming ecosystem. Quoting: "... it needs software that spans the gap between the two camps of offerings which are emerging on Xbox 360 — games that encourage players of Dance Central or Your Shape to move upstream and explore. It's unlikely, perhaps, that they'll ever end up curb-stomping crinkle-faced nasties in Cliff Bleszinski's latest, but we're a long way past the point of the Xbox being all about shooting and driving, even if the public perception hasn't quite moved with the software line-up. The long-term challenge for the games market must, ultimately, be to emulate the success which other mediums have had in creating markets where consumers routinely and happily move between genres, and where franchises which would be pigeonholed as 'hardcore' in the games world nestle comfortably in people's DVD collections alongside those which would be dismissed as 'casual.'"

  

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  Spitzer Telescope Witnesses Star Being Born

  Posted: June 19th, 2010, 9:12am MDT by Soulskill

  Arvisp tips news of a discovery by astronomers using the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Submillimeter Array in Hawaii of the youngest known star in a nearby star-forming region. From the Yale press release: "Astronomers think L1448-IRS2E is in between the prestellar phase, when a particularly dense region of a molecular cloud first begins to clump together, and the protostar phase, when gravity has pulled enough material together to form a dense, hot core out of the surrounding envelope. ... Most protostars are between one to 10 times as luminous as the Sun, with large dust envelopes that glow at infrared wavelengths. Because L1448-IRS2E is less than one tenth as luminous as the Sun, the team believes the object is too dim to be considered a true protostar. Yet they also discovered that the object is ejecting streams of high-velocity gas from its center, confirming that some sort of preliminary mass has already formed and the object has developed beyond the prestellar phase. This kind of outflow is seen in protostars (as a result of the magnetic field surrounding the forming star), but has not been seen at such an early stage until now."

  

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  Verizon Hints At Scrapping Unlimited Data Plans

  Posted: June 19th, 2010, 8:06am MDT by Soulskill

  BusinessWeek reports that Verizon may be preparing to follow AT&T's example by eliminating unlimited data plans later this year. Quoting: "'We will probably need to change the design of our pricing where it will not be totally unlimited, flat rate,' John Killian, chief financial officer of Verizon Communications Inc., the wireless unit’s parent, said in an interview at Bloomberg’s headquarters in New York today. The company anticipates 'explosions in data traffic' over wireless networks as new phones on 4G networks incorporate data-heavy applications, such as video downloads, he said. Verizon is working to keep its network running smoothly as more of its customers switch to smartphones that connect to the Internet. ... 'The more bandwidth that you make available, the faster it will be consumed,' said Craig Moffett, analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in New York. 'From Verizon’s perspective, the last thing you want is for another generation of consumers to be conditioned to the idea that data is always going to be uncapped.'"

  

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  German Publishers Want Monopoly On Sentences

  Posted: June 19th, 2010, 6:58am MDT by Soulskill

  Glyn Moody writes "You think copyright can't get any more draconian? Think again. In Germany, newspaper publishers are lobbying for 'a new exclusive right conferring the power to monopolize speech e.g. by assigning a right to re-use a particular wording in the headline of a news article anywhere else without the permission of the rights holder. According to the drafts circulating on the Internet, permission shall be obtainable exclusively by closing an agreement with a new collecting society which will be founded after the drafts have matured into law. Depending on the particulars, new levies might come up for each and every user of a PC, at least if the computer is used in a company for commercial purposes.' Think that will never work because someone will always break the news cartel? Don't worry, they've got that covered too. They want to 'amend cartel law in order to enable a global "pooling" of all exclusive rights of all newspaper publishers in Germany in order to block any attempt to defect from the paywall cartel by a single competitor.' And rest assured, if anything like this passes in Germany, publishers everywhere will be using the copyright ratchet to obtain 'parity.'"

  

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  Wikileaks Source Outed To Stroke Hacker's Own Ego

  Posted: June 18th, 2010, 4:17pm MDT by Soulskill

  Binary Boy writes "Bradley Manning, the US Army private arrested recently by the Pentagon for providing classified documents — including the widely seen Apache helicopter video — may have been duped by wannabe hacker Adrian Lamo, according to Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com. Lamo told Manning he could provide protection under both journalist shield laws, and the clergy-lay confidentiality tradition, and instead immediately turned him in to authorities in an act of apparent shameless self-promotion." The article also goes into Wired's role in the whole situation, the strange, sometimes sensationalist media coverage, and the odd similarity between this case and proposed scenarios in a US Intelligence report from earlier this year aimed at undermining Wikileaks.

  

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  TACO Extension for Firefox Forked After Proprietary Update

  Posted: June 18th, 2010, 3:31pm MDT by Soulskill

  rtfa-troll writes "Beef Taco is a Firefox extension that allows a mass opt-out from tracking and targeted advertising by many ad networks. The Register reports that the original system, TACO, has become proprietary, and has added new 'features' best described as bloatware. I guess this should serve as a warning for users to always prefer software under a copyleft license where possible. If Google had chosen a license with better protection, such as the GPL, when it released its own opt-out tool, this problem would have been much less likely. This also shows why forks are so important when software development begins to get messy."

  

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  Alberta Scientists Discover Largest-Ever Cache of Dinosaur Bones

  Posted: June 18th, 2010, 3:05pm MDT by Soulskill

  Cryolithic writes "The largest cache of dinosaur bones ever found has been unearthed in Alberta. From the article: '... officials at the Royal Tyrrell Museum say the Hilda site provides the first solid evidence that some horned dinosaur herds were much larger than previously thought, with numbers comfortably in the high hundreds to low thousands. ... Rather than picturing the animals as drowning while crossing a river, a classic scenario that has been used to explain bonebed occurrences at many sites in Alberta, the research team interpreted the vast coastal landscape as being submerged during tropical storms or hurricanes. With no high ground to escape to, most of the members of the herd drowned in the rising coastal waters. Carcasses were deposited in clumps across kilometers of ancient landscape as floodwaters receded.'"

  

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  HTC Android Smartphone Stores Browsing Screenshots

  Posted: June 18th, 2010, 2:47pm MDT by Soulskill

  Mad Hamster writes "Boy Genius Report points out that the HTC Droid Incredible, using the Sense UI, 'will periodically store screenshots of the contents of your web browser.' These shots are stored in such a way that they are not easily deleted. 'They remain when the current browser session is closed, they remain after you clear the browser history, and they remain after a full factory reset,' though there is a way to delete them manually."

  

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  Movie Studio Finally Sees the Light On Rentals

  Posted: June 18th, 2010, 2:04pm MDT by Soulskill

  Griller_GT writes "After months of conducting studies about the effects of delays on sales of DVDs, 'Paramount Pictures has agreed to provide its movies to Redbox on the same day they go on sale.' A Paramount exec said, 'Those people who want to rent are going to figure out ways to rent, and us restricting them from renting isn't going to turn it into a purchase.' Gee, who would have thought of that?" Reader DisKurzion sends in news of another movie business experiment underway by an Australian company called Distracted Media. They are raising funds for a movie called The Tunnel by letting people invest in individual frames for $1 apiece. When the movie is complete, it will be released for free on torrent sites.

  

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  FEMA and DHS Fund Disaster Hero Game

  Posted: June 18th, 2010, 1:38pm MDT by Soulskill

  eldavojohn writes "The United States government has decided that children need a video game to learn about what to do before, during, and after an emergency or hazardous event. Collect an emergency kit! Create an emergency plan! Be informed of what to do! Suffer from heat exhaustion inside the Superdome! ... Wait, what? Oh, I guess FEMA omitted that last one. Disaster Hero is coming in 2011 — plenty of time before 2012."

  

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  Tornado Scientists Butt Heads With Storm Chasers

  Posted: June 18th, 2010, 1:19pm MDT by Soulskill

  An anonymous reader writes "Tornado researchers say amateurs — inspired by movies like Twister and shows like Storm Chasers — are getting in their way, hampering science and creating hazards. 'Hundreds of camera-toting amateurs in cars ended up chasing the same storms as a fleet of scientific vehicles during the high-profile research project, called Vortex2, which wrapped up data collection this week. At times the line of traffic caused the Midwestern roads to look like the freeways of Los Angeles, said Roger Wakimoto, director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, during a briefing for reporters this week. "I worry about this as a safety hazard," Mr. Wakimoto said. "These people were blocking our escape routes because of the sheer number of cars."' Storm chasers say they have as much right to watch storms as Ph.D.s."

  

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  Afghan Tech Minerals — Cure, Curse, Or Hype?

  Posted: June 18th, 2010, 12:36pm MDT by Soulskill

  Gooseygoose writes "The Pentagon revealed recently that Afghanistan has as much as $1 trillion in mineral wealth, a potential game changer in the ongoing conflict there. Many news outlets have picked up this story, some simply repeating the official talking points, while others raise serious concerns. Is this 'discovery' just hype, or will it truly alter the landscape of the Afghan war? Perhaps more importantly, can this mineral wealth (whether real or illusory) pave the way to a peaceful and prosperous Afghanistan, or is it more likely to drive geopolitical feedback loops that plunge the region further into turmoil?" Relatedly, Marc Ambinder wrote a few days ago in the Atlantic that the US had knowledge of vast mineral deposits in Afghanistan several years ago, giving the recent announcement the appearance of a PR campaign.

  

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  Google Street View Wi-Fi Data Includes Passwords, Email Content

  Posted: June 18th, 2010, 11:52am MDT by Soulskill

  snydeq writes "The French National Commission on Computing and Liberty has found passwords and email messages among the Street View Wi-Fi data Google intercepted, InfoWorld reports. The data protection authority has been investigating Google's recording of traffic carried over unencrypted Wi-Fi networks. Google has said it collected only 'fragments' of personal web traffic as it passed by because its Wi-Fi equipment automatically changes channels five times a second. With Wi-Fi networks operating at up to 54Mbps, however, those 'fragments' may have been more than that. 'We can already state that [...] Google did indeed record email access passwords [and] extracts of the content of email messages,' CNIL said."

  

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  US Dept. of Energy Wants Bigger Wind Energy Ideas

  Posted: June 17th, 2010, 10:51am MDT by Soulskill

  coondoggie writes "The Department of Energy wants to kick up the research and development of offshore wind projects as it looks to achieve its goal of producing 20% of the country's electricity from wind farms by 2030. The DOE Wind Program is looking to focus on what it calls specific advanced technology, gigawatt-scale demonstration projects that can be carried out by partnerships with a wide range of eligible organizations and stimulate cost-effective offshore wind energy deployment in coastal and Great Lakes regions of the country. The agency is also looking for more research that can help address market barriers in order to facilitate deployment and reduce technical challenges facing the entire industry, as well as technology that will reduce cost of offshore wind energy through innovation and testing."

  

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  First Self-Replicating Creature Spawned In Conway's Game of Life

  Posted: June 17th, 2010, 10:27am MDT by Soulskill

  Calopteryx writes "New Scientist has a story on a self-replicating entity which inhabits the mathematical universe known as the Game of Life. 'Dubbed Gemini, [Andrew Wade's] creature is made of two sets of identical structures, which sit at either end of the instruction tape. Each is a fraction of the size of the tape's length but, made up of two constructor arms and one "destructor," play a key role. Gemini's initial state contains three of these structures, plus a fourth that is incomplete. As the simulation progresses the incomplete structure begins to grow, while the structure at the start of the tape is demolished. The original Gemini continues to disassemble as the new one emerges, until after nearly 34 million generations, new life is born.'"

  

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  FSF Starts Anti-ACTA Campaign

  Posted: June 17th, 2010, 10:08am MDT by Soulskill

  judgecorp writes "Free Software Foundation president Richard Stallman has said in a blog post that the ACTA file-sharing proposals punish users unfairly. He wrote, 'Any time there is a proposal to change things for the worse, the obvious way to oppose it is to campaign for the status quo. To campaign for the status quo suggests the approach of singing its praises; thus, praising WIPO is a natural way to highlight how ACTA is a step for the worse. However, where there have been previous changes for the worse, lauding the status quo tends to legitimize them. The past 20 years have seen global waves of harmful changes in copyright law — some promoted by WIPO. To confront a further assault by presenting the status quo as ideal means we stop fighting to reverse them. It means that our adversaries need only propose a further affront to our rights to gain our acceptance of their last affront. Instead of making the status quo our ideal, we should demand positive changes to recover freedoms already lost.' The FSF has launched a petition against the ACTA proposals."

  

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  California Tracks Parolees With GPS, Then Ignores Alerts

  Posted: June 17th, 2010, 9:27am MDT by Soulskill

  An anonymous reader writes "Several years ago, California decided to require high-risk parolees, such as gang members and sex offenders, to wear GPS monitoring devices. The idea was to relay location information to law enforcement to ensure that the convicts stay where they're supposed to. Unfortunately, the state often misses acting on those alerts, making the devices both a lesson in the pitfalls of technology management and a massive exercise in largely useless spending."

  

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  LimeWire Sued Again, Publishers Seek $150,000 Per Song

  Posted: June 17th, 2010, 8:47am MDT by Soulskill

  betterunixthanunix writes "Another lawsuit has been filed against LimeWire, this time by the National Music Publishers Association. They claim that LimeWire also damaged them, and seek $150,000 per infringement, putting the maximum possible damages in the hundreds of millions of dollars. LimeWire seems to have become the latest music industry punching bag. 'David Israelite, chief executive of the publishers' association, said his organization had decided to bring the complaint because most publishers were not represented in the record company lawsuit and they were now confident that they had a winning case. ... LimeWire, which says it is trying to start a new paid subscription model, said in a statement on Wednesday that it welcomed the publishers to the table. '"

  

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  Why Intel Wants To Network Your Clothes Dryer

  Posted: June 17th, 2010, 8:04am MDT by Soulskill

  An anonymous reader writes "Intel has shown off a working prototype of a small box that, among other things, can monitor your clothes dryer to see how much it's contributing to your power bill. The Intelligent Home Energy Management proof-of-concept device is a small box with an 11.56-inch OLED touchscreen that is designed to act as an electronic dashboard for monitoring energy use in the home. By equipping devices like home entertainment systems and clothes dryers with wireless networked power adapters, the system can actually report back the power draw for a particular power point. Leave the house, and it can make sure power-draining devices like that plasma TV are turned off. It is unlikely the device will enter production (there are apparently only four in existence), however this story about the box shows something we can expect to see in the home of tomorrow. Ultimately, it's not only about saving money, but also reducing load on the electricity grid by removing needless power use."

  

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  SpaceX and Iridium Sign $492M Launch Contract

  Posted: June 17th, 2010, 6:39am MDT by Soulskill

  FleaPlus writes "Following up on the successful first launch of their Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX has signed a $492M deal for launching several dozen satellites for the Iridium NEXT constellation, the biggest commercial launch deal ever (teleconference notes). This is a needed boost for the US launch industry, which has dwindled to a fraction of the international market due to problematic ITAR arms regulations and high costs. SpaceX's next launch is scheduled for later this summer, carrying the first full version of the Dragon reusable capsule, which will run tests in orbit and then splash down off the California coast."

  

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  Nintendo 3DS Early Impressions

  Posted: June 17th, 2010, 3:47am MDT by Soulskill

  Now that E3 attendees have had a chance to try out the new revision of Nintendo's portable console, critiques of the 3D effect and updated layout are starting to filter in. Opinion thus far has been mostly positive. Wired writes, "The graphics, which are much more advanced than you’d expect from Nintendo, left me pretty much in disbelief. They're on a level with Sony’s PSP, probably even a little better than that. But the eye-popping 3-D effect makes everything that much richer." According to the Guardian's Games blog, it works "beautifully." They add, "You can perceive 3D only if the console is directly in front of you, but this is fine for handheld gaming. I actually found it pretty adaptable in terms of viewing from different vertical positions. It was much more sensitive if the handheld was turned slightly to the left or right, but really, it coped perfectly with the slight shifts and jerks you'd get on a morning commute." During Shigeru Miyamoto's annual dev roundtable, he explained how Nintendo felt that particular types of games, such as shooters, benefit more from the 3D effect than others, and how Nintendo hopes to update as many older games as they can to incorporate 3D gameplay in addition to 3D graphics.

  

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  Fallout Online Website Arises Amid Legal Battle

  Posted: June 17th, 2010, 12:11am MDT by Soulskill

  Rumors of a Fallout MMO have been swirling for years, made all the more credible by hints from the legal battle between Bethesda and Interplay over licensing for the franchise. Now, Interplay has quietly created a teaser website for Fallout Online, offering beta sign-ups. Quoting Massively: "Currently, there isn't much there, just a brief glimpse at a workshop desk with various Fallout references to the Master, Brahmin, and Nuka-Cola before a form obscures the screen. ... It looks legit, too: Interplay is promoting Fallout Online from their main website, and the new teaser site is indeed registered to Interplay Entertainment Corp."

  

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  Cloud Gaming Service OnLive Set For Launch

  Posted: June 16th, 2010, 10:10pm MDT by Soulskill

  Steve Perlman's long-anticipated cloud gaming service, OnLive, officially launches today, finally ready to be put to the test by skeptical and hopeful gamers around the US. After granting some early sign-ups a free year to try out the service, OnLive also announced the list of 23 games that will available from the start, including Mass Effect 2, UT 3, Assassin's Creed 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and F.E.A.R. 2. Perlman spoke at length with Gamasutra about the beta, latency, and potential partnerships with other broadband providers. Future OnLive competitor Gaikai recently announced they're targeting 2011 for their own launch.

  

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  Parallel Programming For the Arduino

  Posted: June 16th, 2010, 11:01am MDT by Soulskill

  blackbearnh writes "As more non-traditional programmers start playing around with embedded platforms like the Arduino, the limitations and complications of interrupt-driven event handling can become an annoying barrier to entry. Now a group of academics have ported the parallel-processing language Occam to the Arduino. In an interview on O'Reilly Answers, Matt Jadud of Allegheny College describes how Occam helps artists using the Arduino in their installations, and how the advent of low-cost computing platforms is changing the educational experience for proto-makers in school. 'Basically, an artist or a tinkerer or a hacker has a goal. They don't really care about learning Occam. They don't care about how this language is different from C. They just want to make a cat door that keeps their cat out when the cat comes back with a mouse. Or they want to make some kind of installation piece. Trying to focus as much on the user and the possible goals they might have is what's motivating our work right now.'"

  

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  San Francisco Requires Cell Phone Radiation Warnings

  Posted: June 16th, 2010, 10:19am MDT by Soulskill

  Lord Ender writes "Poor phone reception may soon be a selling point in San Francisco. A city ordinance was just approved which requires those selling phones to indicate the 'specific absorption rate' (SAR) caused by the radio transmitters in the phones. Cell phone industry groups opposed the law. The FCC already requires phones sold in the US to have SAR levels below 1.6 W/kg, though adverse health effects from such levels of radio exposure have never been conclusively demonstrated."

  

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  Spamhaus Fine Reduced From $11.7M To $27K

  Posted: June 16th, 2010, 9:36am MDT by Soulskill

  eldavojohn writes "In 2006, anti-spam crusader Spamhaus was sued for 'defamation, tortious interference with prospective economic advantage and interference with existing contracts' after blocking 'promotional e-mails' from e360. What with the case being in Illinois and Spamhaus being a British outfit, Spamhaus didn't bloody care. So, e360 was awarded $11.7 million in damages, which was later thrown out in an appeals court with a request for the lower court to come up with actual damage estimates instead of the ridiculous $11.7 million. (e360 had originally stated $135M, then $122M, and then $30M as sums of damages.) As a result, the actual damages were estimated to be just $27,002. While this is a massive reduction in the fine and a little bit more realistic, I think it is important to note that Spamhaus is a service that people proactively utilize. They don't force you to use their anti-spam identification system — it's totally opt-in. And now they're being fined what a foreign judge found to be 'one month of additional work on behalf of the customers' to a company they allegedly incorrectly identified as spam. Sad and scary precedent."

  

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  X Prize Foundation Wants AI Physician On Every Smartphone

  Posted: June 16th, 2010, 8:54am MDT by Soulskill

  kkleiner writes "One of the exciting ideas being tossed around recently at the X Prize Foundation is the creation of an Artificial Intelligence physician that you could access from your smartphone. Want to know if that rash on your leg is poison ivy or smallpox? Take a photo of it with your phone and ask the AI. The possibilities are enormous, especially for the billion plus people around the world who live more than a few hours' walk or drive from the nearest doctor." This is one of four X Prizes in planning for the future. The other three are for an AI automobile driver, organ generation through stem cell use, and a deep sea submersible capable of exploring the sea floor.

  

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  PS Move Launch Date and Price Announced, Portal 2 For the PS3

  Posted: June 15th, 2010, 3:51pm MDT by Soulskill

  Sony took the stage for the last major keynote of E3 this afternoon, splitting their attention evenly between hardware improvements and new games. First, they talked about 3D technology — Sony plans to try driving 3D adoption in a similar way to what they did with Blu-ray, with 20 titles planned for March 2011 or earlier. Headlining those will be Killzone 3 (coming February 2011), Gran Turismo 5 (coming November 2nd), Tron Evolution, Mortal Kombat, and Crysis 2. Sony also released launch details for their PS Move motion control system. It will be released on September 19th in the US, the motion controller will cost $50, and the navigation controller will cost $30. Several games will get retroactive Move support, such as Resident Evil 5, Heavy Rain, and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11. An RPG called Sorcery was demonstrated; your character has a wand that's very similar to the controller, and you throw arcane bolts or draw walls of fire just as you'd expect. Read on for more about Sony's E3 announcements.

  

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  Nintendo Announces Raft of New Games, 3DS Details

  Posted: June 15th, 2010, 12:48pm MDT by Soulskill

  Nintendo gave a keynote presentation at E3 today, showing off a wealth of upcoming titles for the Wii, the DS, and the 3DS. Shigeru Miyamoto started things off by demonstrating Legend of Zelda: The Skyward Sword for the Wii, due out next year. While playing it, you hold the Wii Remote and Nunchuck like a sword and shield, and swing naturally at enemies. There's also a bow and arrow, a whip, and a flying bug you can control to go drop bombs on enemies. Nintendo also briefly showed an NBA Jam game, Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, and a new set of party games that uses the Wii Remote in unusual ways — for example, multiple players balancing it to disarm a bomb, or seeing which player can be the first to pick up the right controller from the table. Continuing on, they revealed GoldenEye 007, a long-awaited successor to the popular N64 game, due out this holiday season. It will feature split screen play, online multiplayer, and several different game modes. Next, Disney came out with a presentation on their upcoming Epic Mickey game. In it, Mickey can interact with the world using paint and paint-thinner, effectively adding onto or removing objects and characters. In addition to the 3D environment, there is also a part of the game that exists as a sidescrolling platformer, with levels based on classic cartoons. Read on for more about Metroid, Kid Icarus, Metal Gear Solid, and the 3DS.

  

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  Uwe Boll, Other Filmmakers Sue Thousands of Movie Pirates

  Posted: June 14th, 2010, 4:31pm MDT by Soulskill

  linzeal writes "Directors whose films have done poorly at the box office are increasingly being solicited by high-powered law firms to file lawsuits with offers of settlement. This practice, which the EFF has been calling extortive and 'mafia-like', has resulted in courts starting to rule in favor of the consumer, and in some cases throwing out the lawsuits. This is all fine and dandy, however, when you are considered the world's worst director and you largely finance films through your own holding company. At that point, the rhetoric and ridicule gets ratcheted up rather quickly."

  

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  AT&T Breach May Be Worse Than Initially Thought

  Posted: June 14th, 2010, 3:47pm MDT by Soulskill

  ChrisPaget writes "I'm somewhat of an authority on GSM security, having given presentations on it at Shmoocon (M4V) and CCC (I'm also scheduled to talk about GSM at this year's Defcon). This is my take on the iPad ICCID disclosure — the short version is that (thanks to a bad decision by the US cell companies, not just AT&T) ICCIDs can be trivially converted to IMSIs, and the disclosure of IMSIs leads to some very severe consequences, such as name and phone number disclosure, global tower-level tracking, and making live interception a whole lot easier. My recommendation? AT&T has 114,000 SIM cards to replace and some nasty architectural problems to fix." Reader tsamsoniw adds that AT&T has criticized the security group responsible for pointing out the flaw, while the group claims they did it 'as a service to our nation.'

  

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  Inertial Mass Separate From Gravitational Mass?

  Posted: June 14th, 2010, 3:04pm MDT by Soulskill

  CPerdue writes with this excerpt from the MIT arXiv blog: "The equivalence principle is one of the more fascinating ideas in modern science. It asserts that gravitational mass and inertial mass are identical. Einstein put it like this: the gravitational force we experience on Earth is identical to the force we would experience were we sitting in a spaceship accelerating at 1g. Newton might have said that the m in F=ma is the same as the ms in F=Gm1m2/r^2. ... All that changes today with the extraordinary work of Endre Kajari at the University of Ulm in Germany and a few buddies. They show how it is possible to create situations in the quantum world in which the effects of inertial and gravitational mass must be different. In fact, they show that these differences can be arbitrarily large."

  

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  Microsoft Unveils Smaller Xbox 360 Model, Kinect Details

  Posted: June 14th, 2010, 2:19pm MDT by Soulskill

  E3 kicked off today, and Microsoft took advantage of its early keynote presentation to show off a ton of new games and features for the Xbox 360. The biggest news for the very near future is that they're releasing a smaller, revamped version of the console, with immediate availability. It's black, it comes with a 250GB HDD and built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi support, and it's priced at $299. Microsoft also put a release date on Kinect, the motion control scheme formerly known as Project Natal: November 4 in the US. It will launch with 15 games, mostly casual-oriented, several of which were demonstrated on-stage. Many new Kinect features were shown as well, such as the dashboard interface, video chat (with support for playing movies both parties can watch), and a partnership with ESPN to provide live and on-demand sports, all controllable with hand gestures and voice commands. (It presently includes college football and basketball, soccer, the NBA, and MLB.) Also notable is a partnership with LucasArts for a Kinect Star Wars game, a fitness game from Ubisoft, and a Forza racing game that uses Kinect and allows players to inspect the cars with an impressive level of detail. Engadget's liveblog of the event has a bunch of pictures from the demonstrations, or you can read a more detailed play-by-play at Ars.

  

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  E-Reserves Under Fire From Publishers

  Posted: June 14th, 2010, 1:36pm MDT by Soulskill

  RackinFrackin writes "Publishers Weekly has a story about a copyright lawsuit lodged against several faculty members and a librarian at Georgia State University. The case, Cambridge University Press, et al. v. Patton et al., involves e-reserves, a practice of making electronic copies of articles available to students. From the article: 'Rather than make multiple physical copies, faculty now scan or download chapters or articles, create a single copy, and place that copy on a server where students can access it (and in some cases print, download, or share). Since the practice relies on fair use (creating a single digital copy, usually from a resource already paid for, for educational purposes), permission generally isn't sought, and thus permission fees aren't paid, making the price right for students strapped by the high cost of tuition and textbooks, as well as for libraries with budgets stretched thinner every year.'"

  

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  The Real Science Gap

  Posted: June 14th, 2010, 12:53pm MDT by Soulskill

  walterbyrd writes "This article attempts to explain why the US is struggling in its competition with other countries in the realm of scientific advancement. 'It's not insufficient schooling or a shortage of scientists. It's a lack of job opportunities. Americans need the reasonable hope that spending their youth preparing to do science will provide a satisfactory career.' I can hardly believe that somebody actually understands the present situation. It continues, 'The current approach — trying to improve the students or schools — will not produce the desired result, the experts predict, because the forces driving bright young Americans away from technical careers arise elsewhere, in the very structure of the US research establishment. For generations, that establishment served as the world’s nimblest and most productive source of great science and outstanding young scientists. Because of long-ignored internal contradictions, however, the American research enterprise has become so severely dysfunctional that it actively prevents the great majority of the young Americans aspiring to do research from realizing their dreams.'"

  

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  Set Free Your Inner Jedi (Or Pyro)

  Posted: June 14th, 2010, 12:08pm MDT by Soulskill

  sirgoran writes "We've all thought about being the hero fighting off evil-doers and saving the day ever since we first saw Star Wars. The folks at Wicked Lasers have now brought that a little closer to reality with their latest release: a 1-Watt blue diode laser that can set skin and other things on fire. From an article at Daily Tech, where they talk about the dangers of such a powerful laser: 'And here's the best (or worst) part — it can set people (or things) on fire. Apparently the laser is so high-powered that shining it on fleshy parts will cause them to burst into flames. Of course it's equally capable of blinding people.' The thing that caught my eye was the price: $200. I wonder if they'll be able to meet the demand, since (if it works as advertised) this will be on every geek's Christmas list."

  

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  Bill Gates' New Version of the Einstein Letter

  Posted: June 14th, 2010, 11:23am MDT by Soulskill

  dcblogs writes "In 1939, Albert Einstein sent 'F.D. Roosevelt, President of the United States,' a letter with a warning about Germany's interest in a new type of energy with potential for use as a powerful bomb. The letter also outlined the competitive threat posed by Germany and steps for improving US research efforts. Last week, Bill Gates, along with GE's CEO and others, met with President Obama to deliver their own message: that of the top 30 companies in the world working on alternative energy, only four are in the US. Similar to Einstein's point and recommendations, Gates and his allies are asking the US to view the alternative energy push as a competitive threat posed by other nations, particularly China, which may be doing a better job in bringing its engineering talent and money to bear on this problem."

  

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  Bill Gates's New Version of the Einstein Letter

  Posted: June 14th, 2010, 11:23am MDT by Soulskill

  dcblogs writes "In 1939, Albert Einstein sent 'F.D. Roosevelt, President of the United States,' a letter with a warning about Germany's interest in a new type of energy with potential for use as a powerful bomb. The letter also outlined the competitive threat posed by Germany and steps for improving US research efforts. Last week, Bill Gates, along with GE's CEO and others, met with President Obama to deliver their own message: that of the top 30 companies in the world working on alternative energy, only four are in the US. Similar to Einstein's point and recommendations, Gates and his allies are asking the US to view the alternative energy push as a competitive threat posed by other nations, particularly China, which may be doing a better job in bringing its engineering talent and money to bear on this problem."

  

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  A Battle of Wits On the Net's Effect On the Mind

  Posted: June 13th, 2010, 11:09am MDT by Soulskill

  An anonymous reader writes "There's a fascinating duel going on between two Harvard-associated authors, Steven Pinker and Nicholas Carr, on the topic of the Net's influence on the mind. In a New York Times op-ed, Pinker criticizes Carr's argument, as laid out in his new book The Shallows, that our use of the Net is encouraging us to become distracted, superficial thinkers. The Net and other digital technologies 'are the only things that will keep us smart,' writes Pinker. In a response on his blog, Carr tears apart Pinker's argument, claiming that Pinker's examples should actually make us even more worried about the possible 'ill effects' the Net is having on our minds. Carr concludes, 'We're training ourselves, through repetition, to be facile skimmers, scanners, and message-processors — important skills, to be sure — but, perpetually distracted and interrupted, we're not training ourselves in the quieter, more attentive modes of thought: contemplation, reflection, introspection, deep reading, and so forth.' Behind the debate is the deeper controversy over whether the human brain is fundamentally adaptable ('neuroplasticity') or genetically locked into patterns of behavior ('evolutionary psychology')."

  

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  Lenovo Trying Face Recognition For Logins On New Laptops

  Posted: June 13th, 2010, 9:50am MDT by Soulskill

  judgecorp writes "Lenovo's new IdeaPads will be using face recognition as a way to replace passwords for users logging onto the laptops. 'Lenovo's VeriFace combines the Windows login and file encryption to password-protect individual files. It identifies users by matching unique features of their faces to photographs taken by the 1.3-megapixel webcam built into the laptop. When Windows users start up their PCs, a camera window pops up in the login frame. The user then just has to adjust their position so their face appears in the window, and VeriFace logs them in automatically.' That could be good, but is the technology really ready for mass market devices? HP ran into trouble when its face recognition software had trouble recognizing people with darker skin."

  

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  China Drops In Domain Registrations From #2 To #4

  Posted: June 13th, 2010, 8:32am MDT by Soulskill

  darthcamaro writes "A year ago, it looked like the .cn country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) for China was growing so fast that it would displace .com. In 2010 that's no longer the case, as .cn has dropped from being the number two global domain by registrations to number four. And yes, .com is still number one. According to VeriSign, the top 10 list of TLDs in the first quarter was: .com, .de, .net, .cn, .uk, .org, .info, .nl, .eu and .ru. So why did .cn decline? Spammers. 'Many of these are low-priced promotional names that have now come up for renewal at a higher price,' said Pat Kane, vice president of naming services at VeriSign. 'The .cn registration decline was also based on the CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) registry's implementation of the real names directive from the Chinese government primarily around verifiable "whois" data.'"

  

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  Newly Discovered Bacteria Could Aid Oil Cleanup

  Posted: June 13th, 2010, 7:11am MDT by Soulskill

  suraj.sun passes along news from Oregon State University, where researchers have discovered a new strain of bacteria that may be able to aid cleanup efforts in the Gulf of Mexico. The bacteria "can produce non-toxic, comparatively inexpensive 'rhamnolipids,' and effectively help degrade polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs — environmental pollutants that are one of the most harmful aspects of oil spills. Because of its unique characteristics, this new bacterial strain could be of considerable value in the long-term cleanup of the massive Gulf Coast oil spill, scientists say." In related news, Kevin Costner's centrifugal separator technology has gotten approval for deployment; now it is only waiting on funding from BP.

  

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  Researchers Create Social Engineering IRC Bot

  Posted: June 12th, 2010, 11:39am MDT by Soulskill

  An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology developed an IRC bot that acts as a 'man in the middle' between two unsuspecting users, modifies URLs passed between them, and also is capable of steering the conversation. Not only does this work surprisingly well on IRC — they found a 76.1% click rate for potentially malicious URLs — but four out of 10 people on Facebook Chat also clicked on links after the bot introduced complete strangers to each other. This would have worked even better if the bot were to clone existing friends' profiles and submit friend requests from those, say researchers."

  

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