Planet Pgc

Text Message Brands Quebec Man a Terror Suspect

An anonymous reader writes "Saad Allami likely never expected that a simple text message of encouragement would have turned his life upside down. But as seen in a similar case of absurd overreaction by authorities, a simple text message is all it takes to have yourself branded as a terrorist. From the article: 'The Quebec man says he was arrested by provincial police while picking up his seven-year-old son at school. A team of police officers stormed into his home, telling his wife she was married to a terrorist. And his work colleagues were detained for hours at the U.S. border because of their connection to him.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 05, 2012 12:21 AM

February 04, 2012

Apple Overturns Motorola's German iPad and iPhone Sales Bans

SpuriousLogic sends this excerpt from a BBC article detailing the suspension of a sales ban on certain Apple products in Germany: "Motorola Mobility had forced Apple to remove several iPad and iPhone models from its online store [yesterday] after enforcing a patent infringement court ruling delivered in December. An appeals court lifted the ban after Apple made a new license payment offer. However, Germany-based users may still face the loss of their push email iCloud service after a separate ruling. 'A suspension like this is available only against a bond, but Apple is almost drowning in cash and obviously won't have had a problem with obtaining and posting a bond.' ... A statement from Apple said: 'All iPad and iPhone models will be back on sale through Apple's online store in Germany shortly.'" Reader DJRumpy points out that Motorola is seeking royalties of 2.25% for Apple's wireless devices in exchange for a license to use Motorola's patents.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 04, 2012 11:10 PM

LibreOffice Developer Community Increasingly Robust

New submitter someWebGeek writes "LibreOffice, the community-driven fork of OpenOffice, appears to have a very healthy and growing group of code contributors. The Document Foundation has published new stats that portray the climbing rates of developer involvement both in terms of numbers of people and numbers of code commits. One of the most encouraging aspects, as noted by Ryan Paul in an article at Ars, is that non-corporate code contributions by independent volunteers constitute the largest slice of the latest commit-pie."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 04, 2012 10:09 PM

Canada's Massive Public Traffic Surveillance System

New submitter cqwww writes "A small magazine in Victoria, BC just uncovered a massive public traffic surveillance system deployed in Canada. Here's a quote from the article: 'Normally, area police manually key in plate numbers to check suspicious cars in the databases of the Canadian Police Information Center and ICBC. With [Automatic License Plate Recognition], for $27,000, a police cruiser is mounted with two cameras and software that can read license plates on both passing and stationary cars. According to the vendors, thousands of plates can be read hourly with 95-98 percent accuracy. ... In August 2011, VicPD Information and Privacy Manager Debra Taylor called me to explain that, even though VicPD had the ALPR system in one of their cruisers, the [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] ran the system, and I should contact them for any information. "We actually don’t have a program," Taylor said. "We don’t have any documents per se." ... A month later, Taylor handed over 600 pages. ... [The claim they kept no documents] was apparently only in reference to digital information. VicPD had kept 500 pages of written, hard-copy logs of every ALPR hit they’d ever seen.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 04, 2012 09:01 PM

German Government Endorses Chrome As Most Secure Browser

New submitter beta2 writes "Several articles are noting that the German IT security agency BSI is endorsing Google Chrome browser: 'BSI ticked off Chrome's anti-exploit sandbox technology, which isolates the browser from the operating system and the rest of the computer; its silent update mechanism and Chrome's habit of bundling Adobe Flash, as its reasons for the recommendation. ... BSI also recommended Adobe Reader X — the version of the popular PDF reader that, like Chrome, relies on a sandbox to protect users from exploits — and urged citizens to use Windows' Auto Update feature to keep their PCs abreast of all OS security fixes. To update applications, BSI gave a nod to Secunia's Personal Software Inspector, a free utility that scan a computer for outdated software and point users to appropriate downloads.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 04, 2012 07:54 PM

Jens Georg: FOSDEM 2012 Talk

Here are my slides to the short talk I did today about Rygel here at FOSDEM.

February 04, 2012 07:21 PM

Milky Way Magnetic Fields Charted

eldavojohn writes "Using radio telescope data, scientists from around the world have plotted the Milky Way Galaxy's magnetic field in the form of Faraday Depth. From the article, 'For 150 years, scientists have measured cosmic magnetic field by observing the Faraday effect. They know that when polarized light passes though a magnetized medium, the plane of polarization turns. This concept is called Faraday rotation. The strength and direction of the magnetic field governs the amount of rotation that occurs. So scientists observe the rotation to investigate the magnetic fields' properties. Radio astronomers study the polarized light from distant radio source, passing through the Milky Way on the way to Earth, in order to measure our Galaxy's magnetic field. By measuring the polarization of the light sources at different frequencies, researchers can determine the amount of Faraday rotation.' In the future, radio telescope technologies like LOFAR, eVLA, ASKAP, MeerKAT and the SKA hope to provide enhanced Faraday rotation data so scientists can better understand turbulence in galactic gas and these galactic magnetic field structures."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 04, 2012 06:50 PM

New Book Helps You Start Contributing To Open Source

jrepin writes "This new book Open Advice is the answer to: 'What would you have liked to know when you started contributing?' 42 prominent free and open source software contributors give insights into the many different talents it takes to make a successful software project; coding, of course, but also design, translation, marketing and other skills. They are here to give you a head start if you are new. And if you have been contributing for a while already, they are here to give you some insight into other areas and projects."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 04, 2012 05:45 PM

NYT growing the wrong way

Henry Blodget and Kamelia Angelova wrote an inspiring piece in Business Insider about the "incredible shrinking New York Times."

They inspired me to try to connect the dots for the Times management, once again. There is a solution to the puzzle, but it requires some radical redirection of attention.

Here are the dots.

Tumblr is hiring reporters to cover itself.

Reddit is doing a great interview of a NYT reporter who wrote a book about the Obama Administration. Brian Stelter, a reporter for the Times says it's the best interview of her he's seen. (She's done a lot of interviews lately.)

Last weekend at a conference in NYC, Stelter said Sources Go Direct keeps him up at night.

Facebook will soon go public with so much cash being generated, and the Times could have been Facebook. But they keep missing that the economics of news is rapidly changing. They erected a Maginot Line to try once more to insist that there has been no change. But it's just keeping them from growing.

A picture named phone.jpg The function of a newsroom in the future is to coordinate the voices of the world to produce a coherent news product. That job will be done in very much the model that Tumblr is doing it. You could have started with a blogging community or you could have started with a news organization, but they're both heading to the same place.

The Times of course has the best newsroom. So why don't they evolve a blogging platform like Tumblr's? They should have. I've been begging them to do it since the mid-90s. There's still time to gather some of the leftover energy in the web, and to be prepared to catch some of the deserters when Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter et al stumble at growing into the space formerly occupied exclusively by the Times, Wash Post, etc.

But less time remains all the time.

Update: The social media editor of the Times read the piece. Apparently she doubts that the Times could have been Facebook. Why? I think it could have been a lot more. Actually I still believe it could be a lot more.

February 04, 2012 05:20 PM

$100,000 Prize: Prove Quantum Computers Impossible

mikejuk writes "Quantum computing is currently a major area of research — but is this all a waste of effort? Now Scott Aaronson, a well-known MIT computer scientist, has offered a prize of $100,000 for any proof that quantum computers are impossible: 'I'm now offering a US$100,000 award for a demonstration, convincing to me, that scalable quantum computing is impossible in the physical world.' Notice the two important conditions — 'physical world' and 'scalable.' The proof doesn't have to rule out tiny 'toy' quantum computers, only those that could do any useful work."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 04, 2012 04:38 PM

President By Day, High-Tech Headhunter By Night

theodp writes "The White House is following up on an offer made by President Barack Obama this week to help find a job for an unemployed semiconductor engineer in Texas. The offer was made during a live online town hall after the ex-TI engineer's wife questioned the government's policy concerning H-1B visa workers. Obama asked for EE Darin Wedel's resume and said he would 'forward it to some of these companies that are telling me they can't find enough engineers in this field.' While grateful, patent-holder Wedel said the president's view on the job prospects for engineers in his field 'is definitely not what's happening in the real world.' Duke adjunct professor Vivek Wadhwa offered his frank take on 40-year-old Wedel's predicament: 'The No. 1 issue in the tech world is as people get older, they generally become more expensive. So if you're an employer who can hire a worker fresh out of college who is making $60,000 versus an older worker who is making $150,000, and the younger worker has skills that are fresher, who would you hire?' Coincidentally, Texas Instruments sought President Obama's help in reducing restrictions on the hiring of younger foreign workers in 2009, the same year it laid off Wedel."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 04, 2012 03:31 PM

Rediscovering the Beatles

It's winter and instead of bike-riding I'm walking. Which means I can listen to music and podcasts and audiobooks while getting my daily exercise. And since my daily walk takes me near Strawberry Fields in Central Park, and near the spot where John Lennon died, I end up thinking about the Beatles a lot. And I've been listening to them too.

Another thing makes a big difference, having Wikipedia pages about almost every Beatles song. For example, I didn't fully understand how the Beatles were breaking up while doing the White Album. I didn't understand how separate McCartney and Lennon were, how bitter George Harrison was, and how frustrated Ringo Starr was that they all couldn't just get along.

There really was a Bungalow Bill and a Prudence, they were real people.

I think it's spooky that one of Lennon's last Beatles songs was Happiness is a Warm Gun, considering how he died.

But the thing that I'm left with is rather mundane, but I wanted to say it anyway. Paul McCartney was, of all the Beatles, the pure songman. He wrote music because he loved music. He really didn't want to do anything else. For him, being a Beatle was the best deal in the world.

Now that probably still is a gross approximation of who McCartney is. But without the net, without Wikipedia, I didn't even have that much to go on. Music is a story, like every other human art. It's the story of one person laid out in a way that others can understand it. A song is saying here I am and this is what I say. Reading the story of the story gives me more to think, and imagine about.

I guess I just wanted to say that all along we had the idea that Lennon was the deep Beatle, and McCartney was somehow the silly one. But I think we got it wrong. As he sang later, there's nothing wrong with a silly love song. Popular music is popular for a reason, because it engages us in a playful way that makes us feel good. Yes we feel a little silly when this point is touched. But that's kind of nice too.

February 04, 2012 02:56 PM

You Will Never Kill Piracy

scottbomb writes "This is perhaps the best op-ed I've read about the whole SOPA/PIPA controversy. The author challenges Hollywood to re-think their entire business model. It will undoubtedly fall on deaf ears, for now. But sooner or later, they will have no choice but to adapt. From the article: 'Now that the SOPA and PIPA fights have died down, and Hollywood prepares their next salvo against internet freedom with ACTA and PCIP, it's worth pausing to consider how the war on piracy could actually be won. It can't, is the short answer, and one these companies do not want to hear as they put their fingers in their ears and start yelling.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 04, 2012 02:25 PM

New Mobile Plan Pools Data On Unlimited Devices

Hugh Pickens writes "PC Magazine reports that Ting, a new reseller of Sprint's voice, 3G and WiMax services, has a new approach to mobile pricing that lets customers buy minutes, messages, and data separately, and allows households to pool them to an unlimited number of phones and data devices on one account. 'Household data plans are the next step for consumers, mainly because people are adding more connected screens and devices to their lifestyle,' writes Kevin Tofel. 'And different household members have different data needs; some use a little while others consume gobs of gigabytes. Why not average out the usage across multiple devices?' Both AT&T and Verizon have hinted at offering shared data plans in the future, but the devil's in the details, says Tofel. 'My hope is that family data plans come soon, to all carriers, just like we have for family voice and messaging plans.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 04, 2012 01:21 PM

Stuart Langridge: It's cold outside

You're gonna catch a cold
From the ice inside your soul
Christina Perri — Jar of Hearts

I bet at four o'clock this morning you weren't in a police station.

Or, at least, if you were I bet you were drunk and I bet it wasn't voluntary.

After the usual Friday night poor showing from my local pub (people who follow me on twitter will be aware that the torture of watching a hundred people think they're affirming their lives by singing Mr Brightside at the top of their voices is a regular part of my balanced weekly diet), I walked home, on a cold and cloudless night. I live about ten minutes walk from town, so the walk's no hardship, except that I was dressed in shirt and no coat and it was, as mentioned, cold.

I need to be clear about this. Ten degrees below zero, Celsius, is seriously chilly when you're standing in it in shirt-sleeves. I'm sure people in actually cold places like Canada or Minneapolis or Refrigeration, North Dakota will be laughing mockingly at this point, but firstly, bugger off, secondly I bet you lot bother to put a coat on when you go out, thirdly it's not two in the morning for you, and fourthly bugger off.

Anyway, I get home and... no door key in my pocket.

You know that feeling when the Fist of Fear grabs your balls when you realise something disastrous has happened? (I don't know what the Fist grabs for women. Feel free to fill me in, or actually maybe not.) Anyway: yeah, that. I went through the usual search-all-pockets-and-then-search-them-all-again routine, just in case a mischievous cold-tolerant leprechaun hid my key from the first search and then put it back, and... no door key. Oh dear.

I'll tell you this; the walk back to the pub again seems a much longer trek. Nowhere near as long as the second return to the house without my key, though, after it turned out no-one had handed it in. And now, what the hell to do, eh? I'm not prescient enough to hide a key in the garden, especially since that's a damned good way to come home one night and find no television where a television used to be, so... locksmith? Do they have 24-hour locksmiths? I can't be the first moron to have done this.

If you're bored today, I have a suggestion for you. Go and find a dude who claims to be a 24-hour locksmith and punch him in his stupid lying face.

Incidentally, how in Jah's name did anyone manage in this situation five years ago without a smartphone, huh?

Not that the internet helps when no-one frigging answers their supposedly-24-hour phone. Also, it turns out that about four of the local 24-hour locksmith companies are actually the same company, who did answer their phone, agreed to send someone, and then after an hour of me standing in the freezing bloody freezing cold confessed that they didn't actually have anyone to send.

It's now half three in the morning, and the shivering is starting to get on my nerves, and I can't get into my house without destroying something like a double-glazed plate glass window which will cost me hundreds of pounds to fix and my hands are shaking enough that I can barely light a cigarette, let alone throw a brick through a door that probably wouldn't break anyway, and I'd like to avoid the police showing up since I have no way of proving that I actually live here except for being able to describe where all the broken bits of skirting-board are, and everywhere is closed and the doors are all locked and it's really spectacularly bone-shudderingly mightily arse-clenchingly ridiculously psychopathically cold, and what to do? I tried sleeping in the shed. Now, cold is not like wind. Being inside a thin empty wooden building does not protect you from it. I was shivering like a jackhammer on a bouncy castle and it was becoming clear, even in my not-very-operational brain state, that lying on the floor at minus ten with only a shirt on could quite possibly lead to me actually freezing to death for real.

Well, if the police came, either I'd get into the house or they'd arrest me, and being arrested would at least make me warm, and right now I'd cut my right hand off if Pol Pot showed up as long as he brought a pair of gloves and some soup.

And then, through the frozen and frosty neurons came the sparkling thought that the police station would be open, wouldn't it?

I actually felt warmer just at the thought. Not much warmer, though.

Anyway, that's how I came to be sitting in the cop shop voluntarily at four am. One lovely copper even made me a cup of tea after I poured out my tale of woe in one long sentence, breaking only for my teeth to chatter together like I was trying to bite through the world.

Police stations: while I appreciate that you're generally there to deal with miscreants and so on, it wouldn't kill you to get rid of two screwed-to-the-ground plastic chairs and put in, say, a chaise longue. After switching my phone to airplane mode I managed to eke out enough battery life that I could sit and read while huddled up against the radiator for five hours until nine o'clock this morning, whereupon I went and fetched the spare key from my estate agent after the longest and coldest and most sleepless night I have ever experienced.

So, tips, for surviving a similar situation.

Have a spare key. Note: I do not have a spare key hidden in my garden, burglars, so don't go looking for it. I do not know how to have a spare key somewhere where you can get at it but thieves cannot; suggestions welcomed.
Have a girlfriend so that there's someone to let you back in.
Next time you see a policeman, be nice to him.

I think I might have a nap now.

February 04, 2012 11:41 AM

The Destruction of Iraq's Once-Great Universities

Harperdog writes "Hugh Gusterson has written a devastating article about what has happened to Iraq's once great university system, and puts most of the blame for its total collapse on the U.S. Quoting: 'While American troops guarded the Ministries of Oil and the Interior but ignored cultural heritage sites, looters ransacked the universities. For example, the entire library collections at the University of Baghdad's College of Arts and at the University of Basra were destroyed. The Washington Post's Rajiv Chandresekara described the scene at Mustansiriya University in 2003: "By April 12, the campus of yellow-brick buildings and grassy courtyards was stripped of its books, computers, lab equipment and desks. Even electrical wiring was pulled from the walls. What was not stolen was set ablaze, sending dark smoke billowing over the capital that day."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 04, 2012 10:12 AM

World's Largest Virtual Optical Telescope Created

erice writes "Astronomers in Chile linked four telescopes together to form a single virtual mirror 130 meters in diameter. Previous efforts had linked two telescopes but this is the first time that all four had been linked. 'The process that links separate telescopes together is known as interferometry. In this mode, the VLT becomes the biggest ground-based optical telescope on earth. Besides creating a gigantic virtual mirror, interferometry also greatly improves the telescope's spatial resolution and zooming capabilities.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 04, 2012 08:26 AM

Facebook On Collision Course With New EU Privacy Laws

An anonymous reader writes "Facebook and other U.S. internet companies are faced with a new EU data protection regime, the Christian Science Monitor reports. U.S. concepts of free expression and commerce will battle European support for privacy and state legislation. 'Companies must understand that if they want access to 500 million consumers in the EU, then they have to comply. This is not an option,' said a spokesman for the EU Justice Commissioner."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 04, 2012 07:14 AM

Researchers Feel Pressure To Cite Superfluous Papers

ananyo writes "One in five academics in a variety of social science and business fields say they have been asked to pad their papers with superfluous references in order to get published. The figures, from a survey published in the journal Science (abstract), also suggest that journal editors strategically target junior faculty, who in turn were more willing to acquiesce. The controversial practice is not new: those studying publication ethics have for many years noted that some editors encourage extra references in order to boost a journal's impact factor (a measure of the average number of citations an article in the journal receives over two years). But the survey is the first to try to quantify what it calls 'coercive citation,' and shows that this is 'uncomfortably common.' Perhaps the most striking finding of the survey was that although 86% of the respondents said that coercion was inappropriate, and 81% thought it damaged a journal's prestige, 57% said they would add superfluous citations to a paper before submitting it to a journal known to coerce. However, figures from Thomson Reuters suggest that social-science journals tend to have more self-citations than basic-science journals."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 04, 2012 05:08 AM

Ask Slashdot: Are Daily Stand-Up Meetings More Productive?

__roo writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that an increasing number of companies are replacing traditional meetings with daily stand-ups. The article points out that stand-up meetings date back to at least World War I, and that in some place, late employees 'sometimes must sing a song like "I'm a Little Teapot," do a lap around the office building or pay a small fine.' Do Slashdot readers feel that stand-up meetings are useful? Do they make a difference? Are they a gimmick?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 04, 2012 03:06 AM

Jasper St. Pierre: GJS Improvements

Myself, Giovanni Campagna as well as Colin Walters have all been working hard trying to make GJS somewhat of a competitor to PyGObject, being a full introspection stack for the GNOME Desktop Environment. Rather than give you a bunch of history, let me just give you a quick taste. There’s much more to the landing than this, such as implementing your own signals, properties, as well as implementing interfaces, but it will take me a few days to come up with an exciting example that fully showcases the power that you now have.

const Lang = imports.lang;

const Cogl = imports.gi.Cogl;
const Clutter = imports.gi.Clutter;
const Gio = imports.gi.Gio;

const MyClutterActor = new Lang.Class({
    Name: 'MyClutterActor',
    Extends: Clutter.Actor,

    vfunc_get_preferred_width: function(actor, forHeight) {
        return [100, 100];
    },

    vfunc_get_preferred_height: function(actor, forWidth) {
        return [100, 100];
    },

    vfunc_paint: function(actor) {
        let alloc = this.get_allocation_box();
        Cogl.set_source_color4ub(255, 0, 0, 255);
        Cogl.rectangle(alloc.x1, alloc.y1, alloc.x2, alloc.y2);
    }
});

const MyClutterEffect = new Lang.Class({
    Name: 'MyClutterEffect',
    Extends: Clutter.DeformEffect,

    vfunc_deform_vertex: function(effect, width, height, vertex) {
        vertex.x += Math.random() * 20 - 10;
        vertex.y += Math.random() * 20 - 10;
    }
});

let actor = new MyClutterActor();
let stage = new Clutter.Stage();
actor.animatev(Clutter.AnimationMode.EASE_IN_OUT_CUBIC, 2000, ['x', 'y'], [200, 200]);
actor.add_effect(new MyClutterEffect());
stage.add_actor(actor);
stage.show_all();

Clutter.main();

February 04, 2012 01:07 AM

Doctors 'Cheating' On Board Certifications

Maximum Prophet writes "After taking board exams, doctors have been routinely getting together to remember and reproduce as much of the exam as they can. These notes are then bound and reproduced. According to the American Board of Dermatology, the exams are protected by copyright laws, and any reproduction not approved by the board is illegal. While I have no doubt that the Board believes this, and pays lawyers to believe it as well, I don't think they understand copyright. Perhaps they should invest in better testing methods."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 04, 2012 01:04 AM

Karen Sandler: In Brussels!

I’ve arrived safely and soundly in Brussels for FOSDEM, despite a weird back injury (I didn’t know you could get those from sneezing…) I’ve had a nice time talking to folks already, even if I’ve gotten a couple of rants about GNOME. There’s been some really great positive discussion too.

I’m excited for the Legal Issues devroom I’m cohosting with Tom, Bradley and Richard and also for the Crossdesktop devroom. I’ll also try to hang around the GNOME booth. Please come and say hi. See you there!

February 04, 2012 12:40 AM

Yes We Can (Profile You): a Brief Primer On Campaigns and Political Data

An anonymous reader writes "In the Stanford Law Review Online, Professor Daniel Kreiss discusses 'the history of political data, focusing on the recent proliferation in voter data and development of new voter-modeling techniques,' and how 'these data practices undermine privacy and democratic practice, even as they increase participation and voter turnout.' He writes: 'Underlying all of this is a vast data infrastructure that has made targeted online advertising and marketing possible, and has contributed to a revival of field campaigning over the last decade. Online advertising and field campaigning rely on voter modeling based on hundreds of data points culled from surveys, public records, and commercial information sources such as credit histories. This data details the location, demographics, political affiliations, social networks, behavior, and interests of citizens.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 04, 2012 12:20 AM

Phil Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog

An Operating System for Your Personal Cloud

Everyone has a cloud strategy these days. Of course, when you hear about clouds, you hear questions like "Are we talking about IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS?" This assumes an enterprise-centric view of clouds that is belied by what Robert Scoble calls the game of games. Facebook, Google, and Apple are most selling clouds in various guises and see their cloud strategy as a key to their future.

The problems with these "personal clouds" is that they have no operating system. An operating system is what makes your personal computer personal. Without an OS, it would be a special purpose appliance that does specific things (like run an office suite) but not others (like play a game). There are certainly those who wish that was the norm, but for now, at least, we have general purpose computers that run a variety of applications and can be configured according to the dictates and wishes of their owners.

[An aside for those of you getting ready to comment: yes Facebook allows apps and is an app platform, but they are ancillary to the experience, not core. The core experience is still very much a Facebook-determined thing.]

The user-focused clouds we see today are special purpose. You can't customize them much or make them do something their builders didn't envision in the selection of applications that they offer.

In contrast a personal event network is like an OS for your personal cloud. You can install apps to customize it for your purpose, it can store and manage your personal data, and it provides generalized services through APIs that any app can take advantage of.

Tags: krl kynetx event+network personal+cloud

February 04, 2012 12:12 AM

February 03, 2012

Apple Clarifies iBooks Author Licensing

bonch writes "After drawing criticism over iBooks Author's licensing language, Apple has modified it in a software update to make clear that Apple is claiming rights to the .ibook format itself and not the content therein: '[The license restriction] does not apply to the content of such works when distributed in a form that does not include files in the .ibooks format.' In other words, the content may be sold on competing book stores as long as it is not packaged using iBooks Author."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 03, 2012 11:59 PM

February 03, 2012 11:49 PM

A standard for RT'ing?

There's a feature in all my rivers that makes it possible to RT a post, directly from the browser to your linkblogging tool.

Here's an example of one of the rivers.

It works with Radio2, and probably nothing else. But any other linkblogger could support it by accepting three parameters. They are: link, title, description.

They came straight from the RSS item.

The first time the user clicks a RT, a dialog asks for the domain name of their linkblogger. It stores it in a cookie, so the user never has to enter it again.

If you have a blogging tool you can support this, probably in a few minutes (and you might already support it if you have a bookmarklet, in which case please let me know).

Satellite Phone Encryption Cracked

New submitter The Mister Purple writes "A team of German researchers appears to have cracked the GMR-1 and GMR-2 encryption algorithms used by many (though not all) satellite phones. Anyone fancy putting a cluster together for a listening party? 'Mr. Driessen told The Telegraph that the equipment and software needed to intercept and decrypt satellite phone calls from hundreds of thousands of users would cost as little as $2,000. His demonstration system takes up to half an hour to decipher a call, but a more powerful computer would allow eavesdropping in real time, he said.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 03, 2012 11:38 PM

Canada's Internet Among Best, Report Says

silentbrad writes "Canadians enjoy among the fastest, most widely available and least expensive broadband Internet in the developed world, says a report released Thursday. The report, based on the results of 52 million speed tests of broadband users across the G7 countries and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) membership, was produced by Montreal-based consulting firm Lemay Yates Associates Inc. on behalf of Rogers Communications Inc., the country's largest broadband service provider. It disputes the OECD's own report, published in July, that ranked Canada's high-speed Internet offerings significantly below those of other countries. The report comes days after the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission revealed a sharp jump in the number of complaints it has received regarding Internet traffic-management practices, or 'throttling' in recent months." And it's about to get a little better — reader ForgedArtificer points out that Rogers has promised to end all throttling over their network by the end of the year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 03, 2012 10:56 PM

Nirbheek Chauhan: An unintended gem about usability

<UU> Somedays, I think why can't we have computers which just work.
<UU> But then I remember that I am a Computer Scientist.
<UU> So, yeah, I guess I understand why.
<Nirbheek> :D

Quite related to GNOME, really.

February 03, 2012 10:35 PM

83-Year-Old Woman Gets New 3D-Printed Titanium Jaw

arnodf writes "The University of Hasselt (in Belgium) announced today (Google translation of Dutch original) that Belgian and Dutch scientists have successfully replaced an 83-year-old woman's lower jaw with a 3D-printed model. According to the researchers, 'It is the first custom-made implant in the world to replace an entire lower jaw. ... The 3D printer prints titanium powder layer by layer, while a computer controlled laser ensures that the correct particles are fused together. Using 3D printing technology, less materials are needed and the production time is much shorter than traditional manufacturing. The artificial jaw is slightly heavier than a natural jaw, but the patient can easily get used to it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 03, 2012 10:16 PM

Seattle Library Lets Man Watch Porn On Computers Despite Complaints

The Lake City library is making news for their staunch position on the First Amendment, censorship, and the right to watch porn in the library. The problem started when library patron Julie Howe found a man watching some questionable material and asked him to move to another computer. The man refused and the librarian also refused to intervene when asked saying that the library doesn't censor content. "We're a library, so we facilitate access to constitutionally protected information. We don't tell people what they can view and check out," Seattle Public Library spokeswoman Andra Addison told Seattle PI. "Filters compromise freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment. We're not in the business of censoring information."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 03, 2012 09:57 PM

Ian McIntosh: Zoom H1 firmware update 2.0 adds USB Digital Audio support in Linux

I’m so happy about this added functionality! I want to publicly thank Zoom for such a great free update.

The Zoom H1 makes super high quality recordings, and now also serves as a high quality digital audio mic while connected to a Linux computer.

Performing the Zoom H1 version 1.x to 2.0 upgrade in Linux

In short, this fails.

Something about writing the H1MAIN.bin to the Fat32 file system in Linux causes the very brittle upgrade process to fail. It will notice the file and begin the process, and end with “WRITE ERROR”. Thankfully it doesn’t brick the device.

The solution is to:

copy your recordings off the device
format the card inside the device: hold the Trash button while turning it on, then confirm the format by pressing the Record button
copy the H1MAIN.bin file to the root of the device’s filesystem using a Windows computer (download Zoom H1 System Software Version 2.0 and unpack)
initiate the upgrade: turn on the device while holding the Play/Pause button, then confirm the upgrade by pressing the Record button (twice)

Once upgraded, the mic functionality is detected and works automatically in Ubunutu (and presumably other Linux distros), and shows up in PulseAudio as both an Input and an Output. This means you also now have two audio outputs.

It even works in the Luz Spectrum Analyzer. Enjoy!

February 03, 2012 09:50 PM

February 03, 2012 09:32 PM

Web Guru To the Blind

the_newsbeagle writes "Chieko Asakawa went blind at age 14, learned to program mainframe computers by sense of touch, and has spent her 27 years at IBM-Tokyo bringing personal computing and the Internet to the blind. From the article: 'By 1997 she had developed a plug-in that worked with the Netscape browser, mapping Web navigation commands to the computer keyboard's number pad and using text-to-speech technology to read out content. Computer stores around the world sold IBM's Home Page Reader, and Asakawa says its effect on the blind community was immediate, electric, and sometimes touching. ... Other browsers for the blind followed IBM's groundbreaking efforts, and Asakawa moved on to addressing a deeper problem: the fact that designers were unintentionally creating inaccessible websites. She and her team wrote a program called aDesigner ... to allow designers to experience a site as blind users do and to suggest ways to improve navigation for audio browsers.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Steve Appleton, Micron CEO, Dies In Plane Crash

CR0WTR0B0T writes "Micron CEO Steve Appleton was killed in a plane crash around 9AM on Friday, February 3rd. He was flying an experimental fixed-wing single engine Lancair, which crashed in between two runways at the Boise airport."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 03, 2012 09:09 PM

Jani Monoses: Recent misc likes

Even though some of these tools have been around for years, I have only recently started using them.

* byobu - nicer than plain screen with good defaults, for example key binding for scrolling is like in a regular terminal.

* sbuild - nicer than pbuilder, defaults to overlay directory instead of tarball, hence fast by default, nice colors, build summary. I have heard about it for a long time, but the recent mention during Ubuntu devel week made me curious. It is friendlier now - no need for LVM snapshots. http://wiki.debian.org/mk-sbuild

* syncpackage - which now allows syncing from Debian if you have Ubuntu upload rights. No need to burden the archive team members anymore for every sync or go the roundabout way of getting from Debian and then uploading manually without changes.

* Modern Debian packaging in the form of the 3.0(quilt) source format and the new dh tools. The former allows a cleaner separation between the upstream and distro bits while the latter makes the debian/rules file much shorter and cleaner even than with CDBS, let alone with the classic debhelper way.

* Twitter Bootstrap - mostly unrelated to packaging or command line stuff, but very nice regardless. CSS+Javascript UI elements that for me at least make jQueryUI superfluous, while being promoted as 'oh, just a CSS framework and style guide, not much else'.

February 03, 2012 08:53 PM

ACTA's EU Future In Doubt As Poland Suspends Ratification

superglaze writes "Poland has suspended its ratification process for ACTA, throwing the copyright crackdown into doubt for the whole European Union. ACTA is being handled as a 'mixed agreement' in the EU due to its criminalization clauses, so if a single EU member state (such as Poland) fails to ratify it, it is null and void across the entire union. If that were to happen, at least six of the remaining international signatories would have to ratify ACTA for it to apply anywhere in the world. Outside the EU, only eight countries — including the U.S. — have signed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 03, 2012 08:50 PM

Firefox's Web Push Notification System Announced

eldavojohn writes "Describing Notifications as 'somewhere between email and IM,' Mozilla has announced this push technology as a way to receive notifications from websites without having to keep them open in your browser — as well as receiving them on your mobile device. A JavaScript API reveals early interface ideas by the team. This core concept is not new — both Google and Apple have their own push notification systems for Android and iOS respectively. However, 'It's important to note that this push notification system is distinct from the existing desktop notification mechanisms that are already defined in pending standards. The desktop notifications that websites like GMail and Seesmic Web display to Chrome users, for example, will only work when the website is left open in a tab. Mozilla's push notification system moves beyond that limitation.' Mozilla is attempting to take push notifications to the entire web for any website to use."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 03, 2012 08:07 PM

Did North Korea Conduct Secret Nuclear Tests?

gbrumfiel writes "In May of 2010, North Korea made the bizarre claim that it had achieved nuclear fusion. Many, many commentators (including faithful Slashdot readers) mocked the dear leader for his outlandish boast, but could there have been a kernel of truth in the claim? Apparently some odd radioactivity was spotted by detectors surrounding the North just days after the announcement. Now, a new analysis by a Swedish scientist suggests that the radiation may have leaked from covert experiments into boosting fission warheads. The evidence is tentative at best, and many are skeptical, but it does seem that something odd was up on the Korean peninsula that spring."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 03, 2012 07:25 PM

Windows Phone 8 Detailed, Uses Windows 8 Kernel

MrSeb writes "Thanks to a leaked video — a video that Microsoft made for Nokia — we now have lots of details about Windows Phone 8 (WP8). From deep Windows 8, Skype, and SkyDrive integration, through to the addition of NFC 'wallet' payments and BitLocker encryption, it sounds like Windows Phone 8 will be close to iOS and Android in terms of features. The interesting stuff is under the hood, though: WP8 will have the Windows 8 kernel instead of the Windows CE kernel of its predecessors. Through the Win 8 kernel, WP8 will support native code and multi-core processors. It will also have the same network stack, security, and multimedia support as Windows 8. While Win 8 apps won't be directly compatible with Windows Phone 8, Windows Phone manager Joe Belfiore says developers will be able to 'reuse — by far — most of their code.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 03, 2012 06:42 PM

RIAA Wants To Scrap Anti-Piracy OPEN Act

silentbrad writes with these selections from an article at Ars Technica: "The Recording Industry Association of America found itself in an unusual position this week: opposing an anti-piracy bill that's gaining momentum in Congress ... the RIAA argues the bill won't be effective at shutting down rogue sites. The trade group warns of 'indefinite delays' as claims of infringement are investigated. And it complains that the process envisioned by OPEN would allow for 'endless submissions by parties such as Google,' further gumming up the process. All the while, the alleged rogue site would be able to continue operating. The RIAA also warns that the need to hire an attorney to navigate the ITC's arcane legal process will 'put justice out of reach for small business American victims of IP theft.' The trade group complains that sites aren't held responsible for the infringing activities of their users, a rule the trade group says 'excuses willful blindness and outright complicity in illegal activity.' RIAA also says it's 'virtually impossible' to prove that a site infringed willfully, as OPEN requires."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 03, 2012 06:00 PM

What's the Damage? Measuring fsck Under XFS and Ext4 On Big Storage

An anonymous reader writes "Enterprise Storage Forum's long-awaited Linux file system Fsck testing is finally complete. Find out just how bad the Linux file system scaling problem really is."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 03, 2012 05:40 PM

Anonymous Posts Audio of Intercepted FBI Conference Call

DrDevil writes "A member of the computer hacking group Anonymous has hacked into a telephone conference between the FBI and Scotland Yard (London Police) and posted it on the internet. The Daily Telegraph has a comprehensive article on the hack. The audio of the call can be heard here." Reader eldavojohn snips as well from the AP's story as carried by Google: "Those on the call talk about what legal strategy to pursue in the cases of Ryan Cleary and Jake Davis — two British suspects linked to Anonymous — and discuss details of the evidence gathered against other suspects."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 03, 2012 05:19 PM

Chinese Boy Claims To Have Cat-Like Night Vision

Oswald McWeany writes "Reports swirling around the Internet are that a boy in China may have cat-like night vision. The boy with eerie blue-eyes was able to fill out a questionnaire in the dark and his eyes reflect like a cat's when a light is shined on them. No reports yet if he marks his territory or is litter box trained."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 03, 2012 05:02 PM

Thanks to DRM, Some Ubisoft Games Won't Work Next Week

hypnosec writes "Several of Ubisoft's biggest titles won't be playable as of next week thanks to a server move by the publisher and the restrictive DRM that was used in their development. This isn't just multiplayer either. Because Ubisoft thought it would be a smart plan to use always on DRM for even the single player portion of games like Assassin's Creed, even the single player portion of that title won't be playable during the server move. Some of the other games affected by this move will be Tom Clancy's HAWX 2, Might & Magic: Heroes 6 and The Settlers 7. The Mac games that will be broken during this period are Assassin's Creed, Splinter Cell Conviction and The Settlers. This move was announced this week as part of a community letter, with Ubisoft describing how the data servers for many of the publisher's online services would be migrated from third party facilities to a new location starting on the 7th February. The publisher didn't reveal how long the transfer would take."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 03, 2012 04:37 PM

Murray Cumming: Openismus at FOSDEM 2012

A few Openismus people will be at FOSDEM In Brussels this weekend. FOSDEM is always a great conference, but I can’t be there myself as my travel is generally limited by the need to take care of my kids.

Michael Hasselmann and Jon Nordby are both giving talks about the Maliit input method framework, as seen on the N9. We are eager to find customers who need our help to integrate and improve this only real choice for an open-source on-screen keyboard. So we hope that some people of influence take the opportunity to get to know the project and its excellent developers.

Jens Georg is also giving a talk about Rygel, used in the N9 to support UPnP and DLNA. For German speakers, there are already video and slides online of a recent talk that Jens did about Rygel in Berlin for Deutsche Telekom’s Developer Garden. I was amused to discover that DLNA had specified themselves into a situation where a minimum certified server and a minimum certified receiver were only able to share a small resolution JPEG format. Apparently it’s getting better, and Rygel can deal with it all.

February 03, 2012 04:07 PM

Bryen Yunashko: Name that event! Poll for openSUSE Event in Florida

As promised, the poll to name the openSUSE event to be held in Orlando, FL September 21-23, 2012 is now online. Please vote before February 11th!

Naming Poll

And as always, if you want to get involved in planning, please visit our planning page.

Thanks!

Bryen M Yunashko

February 03, 2012 03:54 PM

Alzheimer's Transmission Pathway Discovered

smitty777 writes "Two separate studies by the Taub Institute and Harvard have discovered the pathway used by Alzheimer's Disease to spread through the brain. The studies indicate it's not a virus, but a distorted protein called Tau which moves from cell to cell. Further, the discovery 'may now offer scientists a way to move forward and develop a way to block tau's spread in Alzheimer's patients, said Karen Duff, a researcher at Columbia's Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's disease and co-author of one study published Wednesday in the journal PLoS One. "It's enlightening for us because it now provides a whole other area for potential therapeutic impact," said Duff. "It's possible that you can identify the disease and intervene (with potential tau-blocking drugs) before the dementia actually sets in."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

February 03, 2012 03:54 PM

Signal Vs Noise

Customer support beyond email

We’re seven members strong now and we’re able to add a lot of things our customers have been seeking. The bigger team also lets each of us work on support projects other than answering emails lightning fast. Since our sysops, developers and designers have been rightly bragging about the great things they’re doing, I thought I’d take the opportunity to tell you about what our amazing team has been doing to improve customer happiness.

Basecamp 101
The mere whisper of the word ‘webinar’ used to make my blood run cold. The library and academic worlds (my old stomping grounds) are lousy with them. I found them to be time sinks where people who didn’t have a full grasp of a topic held their attendees virtually hostage as we endured technical difficulties and dry Powerpoint presentations. My bias came with me when I got to 37signals, so I was surprised to see the number of customers who really wanted a webinar.

After a bit of research in the Fall, Merissa and Chase started a “Basecamp 101” online class that now runs almost every week. I have to say, it’s really terrific. If other webinars had butts, Chase and Merissa’s would be kicking them. Their class is fun and it gives space for potential customers to ask questions of Merissa, Chase and Michael at the end.

It’s exciting tell our customers that we can offer them a demonstration of setting up a project before they even sign up for Basecamp. If you want to check it out sometime, the next one is always listed on our Help page.

Help Videos
There’s plenty of research demonstrating different learning styles, and the support team can definitely attest to the fact that not everyone learns best by reading help documentation. We have some pretty great help pages, but sometimes words and screenshots can’t do justice to some of the features and functions of Basecamp or Highrise. Chase made it his mission to create some really great screencasts for many of our frequently asked questions. You can see the ones he’s created for Basecamp and Highrise. They’ve been a great asset for the support team and have helped our customers in a big way.

Live Chat
Through the Summer and Fall of 2011, we ran live help chat (thanks to our pals at Olark) on highrisehq.com to assist potential customers who had a few questions before signing up for a plan. The whole support team spent a few hours on live chat each day and we noticed that a lot of current customers were using the service to get help. We decided to give it a shot in Basecamp accounts as a premium support feature. If you’re an admin on a Max Basecamp plan or any Suite, you’ll see this friendly little box at the bottom of your Basecamp dashboard:

Of course, we did endure some “Who the heck is this?”s and “Are you a robot?”s the first few weeks, but we’re almost two months into offering the feature and it’s been a great experience. The team can answer questions faster and it’s a true pleasure to interact with our customers in a new way.

Faster Common Requests
Resident support whiz kid Ann is not just great at helping us answer support questions, she’s also quite handy with the console as well. Every day we see some common requests that involve some On Call programmer work and Ann’s been taking on a lot of the common tasks that we used to send to the programming team, including things like:

Un-sticking Highrise exports/imports
Finding out who deleted/moved something or changed permissions in an app (known in the support team as an “Ooooh, girl, who…” question )
Creating file archives

It’s been a huge load off our On Call team and it helps us take care of our customers much faster than they expect.

These are all things we’ve been able to add to support in the past five months, and Basecamp Next isn’t even out yet. I don’t know about you, but I’m excited to see what the rest of 2012 holds.

February 03, 2012 03:32 PM