Articles by Slashdot from August 2011

An anonymous reader writes "After some rumors of this last month, Pakistan has now officially told all of the country's ISPs that they need to block all encrypted VPNs since content running over such ...

duh P3rf3ss3r writes "The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals has just affirmed the District Court ruling in SCO v Novell (PDF) in its entirety. The decision is quite a good read and lays out the reasons w...

Zothecula writes with a rather extensive piece in Gizmag about Steve Jobs's various business endeavors. From the article: "Revered by many, hated by some, but respected by most, the indisputable fact ...

nonprofiteer writes "Embarrassing thieves by exposing them using laptop recovery software makes for fun tech stories, but what about a case of a person being literally exposed after cops and a softwar...

bazzalunatic writes "Astronomers have found an infant red dwarf star 27 light years away from Earth, and it's just 40 million years old. 'The star has been known about and studied for the past 15 year...

Accepted on the first attempt, lochnessie writes "HP has announced a limited manufacturing run of Touchpads to be available in the next few weeks. The HP employee making the announcement posted 'I thi...

OverTheGeicoE writes "The Electronic Privacy Information Center has filed for a rehearing in their case against DHS regarding airport body scanners. In their latest court filing (PDF), EPIC argues tha...

Julie188 writes "Taking without contributing back to the upstream project defeats the benefit of open source and sooner or later, all open source users realize this, contends Jim Zemlin, executive dir...

hellkyng writes with a transcript of interesting chat logs in Krebs on Security. From the article: "Leaked online chats between the co-owners of the world's largest pharmacy spam operation reveal the ...

Many users have written in with news of Google and OpenDNS working together on The Global Internet Speedup Initiative. They've reworked their DNS servers so that they forward the first three octets of...

First time accepted submitter Quince alPillan writes "The bacteria behind the Black Death has a very unusual history. Its ancestor is an unassuming soil bacterium and the current strains of Yersinia p...

An anonymous reader writes "Vasco, the owner of the DigiNotar CA implicated in the MITM attacks on Iranian Google users has responded to their fraudulently issued certificate problems. The press relea...

MrSeb writes "With a masterful nail in the optical disc coffin, Microsoft has announced that its new operating system will natively mount ISO disc images. On the slightly more enterprisesque side of t...

mikejuk writes "When Cornell's Creative Machines Lab got two chatbots to settle down for a short interaction the result was surreal, to say the least. Is one of them the future winner of the $100,000 ...

An anonymous reader writes "The founders of The Pirate Bay, possibly the best-known BitTorrent tracking service in existence, are going legit with a new file-sharing site which they claim will adhere ...

First time accepted submitter Dr Max writes "During Display Taiwan, Transcend and Taiwan's ITRI displayed a finger-long USB stick that reportedly offers 2 TB of storage. That's no typo. It somehow hol...

tekgoblin writes "Google plans to use data from its +1 button to re-order search results and keep spammers at bay. While this would bring Google’s search engine into the social networking e...

First time accepted submitter JP205 writes "Verizon recently disabled FTP access for its Internet customers who use its proprietary service to build their personal websites. It turns out that if you w...

First time accepted submitter phoolishcyrus writes "Dear Slashdot: would you kindly take a look at our little project, PTVS — Python Tools for Visual Studio? It helps you develop Python (using a...

littlekorea writes "Cables leaked by Wikileaks have revealed that the U.S. Government actively pressured the EU Competition Commissioner to approve Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems. The cable ...

angry tapir writes "I recently had a chance to interview Kaj de Vos, the lead developer of Syllable: An open source desktop operating system that's not based on Linux nor one of the BSDs. There's a wr...

jamesl writes "Cliff Mass, a climate researcher at the University of Washington and popular Seattle blogger, asks, 'When did Irene stop being a hurricane? ... there is really no reliable evidence of h...

jjp9999 sends word of a game in development that mashes up Super Mario Bros. and Portal. Dubbed Mari0 by its developer, the game is being built on the Löve framework and will be released for free...

arglebargle_xiv writes "Following on from Comodogate, we have another public CA issuing genuine false certificates to Iran, this time for Google. There's speculation that it's a MITM by the Iranian go...

itwbennett writes "Weak penalties and a lack of enforcement have made China a hotspot for software piracy, but it is possible to turn some pirated software into sales, says Vic DeMarines, vice preside...

holy_calamity writes "A startup called MobileWorks claims to offer human-level intelligence to any piece of software, with APIs for image, text or speech processing that crowdsource tasks to workers i...

jamesl writes "Cliff Mass, a climate researcher at the University of Washington and popular Seattle blogger, asks, 'When did Irene stop being a hurricane? ... there is really no reliable evidence ...

adeelarshad82 writes "While a $99 TouchPad running webOS is a pretty good deal on its own, most of us got it hoping developers would eventually figure out how to run Android on it. And though we were ...

CWmike writes "Microsoft said today it will 'ribbonize' the file manager in next year's Windows 8, adding Explorer to the short list of integrated applications that already sport the interface in Wind...

sciencehabit writes "Hundreds of species of bacteria call the human gut their home. This gut 'microbiome' influences our physiology and health in ways that scientists are only beginning to understand....

hypnosec tips a bit of Apple news from late last week that got overshadowed by the headlines about Steve Jobs. According to El Reg, "People logging in to Macs running OS X 10.7, aka Lion, can access r...

adeelarshad82 writes "German paper Der Freitag claims it has uncovered a batch of online unredacted diplomatic cables that came from WikiLeaks. Editor Steffen Kraft said he found a 'password protected...

An anonymous reader writes "A blog post published by Mozilla community contributor Tyler Downer claims the Mozilla Triage QA process is broken, and he believes that the rapid release implementation do...

The hacker with perhaps the most famous first name around, Kevin Mitnick, has gone from computer hacking of the sort that gets one on the FBI's Most Wanted list (and into years of solitary confinement...

CoveredTrax writes "If you weren't alive to witness Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech on the Washington Mall 48 years ago this week, you might try to switch on the old YouTube and dial it u...

Hitting the front page for the first time, ke4qqq writes "CloudStack has dropped the open core model and gone completely open source. The latest merge of formerly-proprietary features include VMware a...

itwbennett writes "Blogger Dan Tynan was one of the recipients of the new privacy controls that Facebook promised last week. The bad news: They still don't work, and may even be worse than before. 'Us...

tetrahedrassface writes "According to the Wall Street Journal, Federal agents again raided guitar maker Gibson this past week, seizing several pallets of wood and computer documents. At heart of the i...

Med-trump writes "Stanford microsurgeons have used a poloxamer gel and bioadhesive, rather than a needle and thread, to join together blood vessels. The technique, published in the recent issue of Nat...

An anonymous reader writes "A blog post published by Mozilla's recently-departed Community Lead, Tyler Downer, claims the Mozilla Triage QA process is broken, and he believes that the rapid release im...

An anonymous reader writes "Bloomberg reports that AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile USA will be dumping over $100 million into developing their mobile payment system, Isis, in an effort to battle back ...

Buffaloaf writes "The brilliant minds at Singularity University are developing an internet of things they dub the Matternet which plans to deliver drugs and other small necessities to people in extrem...

With his first accepted Slashdot submission, Zandamesh sends this excerpt from ZDNet: "On earth, nuclear reactors are under attack because of concerns over damage caused by natural disasters. In space...

An anonymous reader writes "This article explores one of the stumbling blocks currently facing EV adoption: 'Sure, there are already public charging stations in service, and new ones are coming online...

An anonymous reader writes "The latest browser benchmarks are in... again. This is one of the better 'browser battle' articles, though. Chrome 13, Firefox 6, IE9, Opera 11.50, and Safari 5.1 are put t...

theodp writes "If Apple's looking for a seamless transition, advises the NYT's James B. Stewart, it definitely shouldn't look to Hewlett Packard. In the year after HP CEO Mark Hurd was told to hit-the...

cylonlover writes "Researchers at MIT and Princeton have now devised a system, dubbed SignalGuru (PDF), that gathers visual data from the cameras of a network of dashboard-mounted smartphones and tell...

neonsignal writes "Machine creations in Minecraft are becoming increasingly complex as people build on each other's ideas. Some notable examples include a Rubik's cube simulator, a 5 channel music seq...

shibashaba writes "Mandriva 2011 is out. Look around for ISOs or click here if you already have Mandriva installed. [Or use the 32-bit torrent.] Mandriva may not be as popular as Ubuntu, but they came...

angry tapir writes "Apparently the age of 'superpoking' social network friends and throwing sheep at them is coming to a close. Google plans to shut down the social applications developed by Slide, a ...

An anonymous reader writes "Github projects may be seeing a different kind of contributor than normal: a small bot is now crawling through projects, contributing spelling corrections. It builds on top...

An anonymous reader writes "The site Python Fiddle, like the similarly named jsFiddle, allows users to post code and share it with others. However, unlike jsfiddle, pythonfiddle brings a major advance...

Even in a country and a world where copyright can be claimed as an excuse to prevent you from taking a photo of a giant sculpture in a public, tax-paid park, and openly recording visiting police on yo...

An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from Conceivably Tech: "On Friday I noticed that Google is heavily pushing New Game, a game developer conference that is focused on HTML5-based gaming cont...

First time accepted submitter sjwaste writes "Slashdot posts a fair number of physics stories. Many of us, myself included, don't have the background to understand them. So I'd like to ask the Slashdo...

Trailrunner7 writes "A new worm called Morto has begun making the rounds on the Internet, infecting machines via Remote Desktop Protocol. The worm is generating a large amount of outbound RDP traffic ...

Zothecula writes with a snippet from Gizmag: "In the recent past, we've seen outfits that incorporate bio-sensors and batteries, and even a bikini with integrated solar cells. One of the latest innova...

David Gerard writes "Eric Schmidt has revealed that Google+ is an identity service, and the 'social network' bit is just bait. Schmidt says 'G+ is completely optional,' not mentioning that G...

astroengine writes "In the wake of the Russian Progress vehicle crash shortly after launch on Aug. 24, a chain of events has been set into motion that could result in the decision not to fly astronaut...

First time accepted submitter phonewebcam writes "Here's something to liven up your weekend: a video of the Raspberry Pi running Quake 3. We're still working on ironing a few kinks out (specifically, ...

theodp writes "Among the first three schools using Chromebooks for Education is the Merton Community School District, which decided to go Chromebook after the Wisconsin Dept. of Public Instruction (WD...

jjp9999 writes "A documentary commissioned by Eidos Montreal explores the possibilities of cyborg technology found in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, comparing it to technology found today. The 12-minute f...

MojoKid writes "For a CPU that hasn't seen the light of day, there's a great deal of debate surrounding Apple's A6 and the suggestion that it may not appear until later in 2012. The A6 is a complex bi...

decora writes "Pallab Ghosh of the BBC reports on another piece of evidence hitting the beleaguered Supersymmetry community. Scientists at the Lepton Photon conference in Mumbai, India confirmed that ...

Shareable writes with word of the intriguing work of a Berkeley professor who has developed a "low-cost, low-power cell base station featuring easy, off-the grid deployment with solar or wind power; l...

An anonymous reader writes "Following the announcement about its major privacy revamp this week, Facebook has announced it is killing two of its products. The company has axed Facebook Places, althoug...

phy_si_kal writes "Opa, a new open source programming language aiming to make web development transparent, has been publicly launched. Opa automatically generates client-side JavaScript, and handles c...

jjp9999 writes "Markus 'Notch' Persson, the creator of Minecraft, showed off some features of the upcoming v1.8 at PAX, which includes the long-awaited adventure update. The video shows off villages, ...

NotSanguine writes "Sexual relations between ancient humans and their evolutionary cousins were critical for our modern immune systems, researchers report (paper itself is subscription only) in the jo...

First time accepted submitter hairyfish writes "Do we still need time zones? Time zones are a relic of the past, when different parts of the world were isolated, and 12 p.m. was whenever the sun w...

An anonymous reader writes "To pay his tribute to Steve Jobs, Joseph Tame, a media producer and a marathon runner from Tokyo, ran 21 kms in 2 hours — starting from the western side of the Imperi...

mikejuk writes "The latest version of FlightGear, 2.4, has just been released — and it has some significant improvements. Now it simulates weather so that you can ride the up draft from a range ...

kdawson writes "A paper up on the ArXiv claims to disprove the gravity-from-entropy theory of Erik Verlinde, which we discussed soon after he introduced the idea in a symposium late in 2009. Archil Ko...

An anonymous reader writes "The developers behind the Mesa 3D graphics library, which provides the default graphics driver support for most hardware on Linux (and BSD/Solaris), has ended their support...

According to the New York Post — among many others — Amazon is expected to launch its long-anticipated color tablet in late September or October, and the device is slated to sell for 'hund...

Trailrunner7 writes with the report that "The Apache Software Foundation plans to have a fix available in the next day or so [Note: that means today, now. --Ed.] for the denial-of-service problem in A...

chill writes "Researchers at the department of geophysics of the Brazil National Observatory have showed evidence of the existence of an underground river that flows 13,000 feet beneath the Amazon. Th...

theodp writes "There are bonuses. And then there are bonuses. Apple's board, led by sadly frail-looking chairman Steve Jobs, signaled its long-term confidence in Tim Cook as the company's new leader, ...

hypnosec writes "Celebrities have moved swiftly to block their names from the .xxx domain, which is meant for websites that offer pornographic content. Thousands of celebrities have contacted ICM Regi...

An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix is reporting that X.Org Server 1.11 has been officially released to users of Linux and other operating systems. This time around their reporting is more detailed t...

thecarchik writes with the snarky-sounding claim that Elon Musk, CEO of electric-car startup Tesla Motors, sometimes says "things that later prove not to be quite true." thecarchik coontinues: In that...

oxide7 links this bit of sobering news, as reported by the International Business Times: "For the first time, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has ordered a mandatory evacuation of 300,000 reside...

Thelasko writes "Ever wonder why heads of state tend to age twice as fast as the rest of us? New research shows that adrenaline may damage DNA, potentially accelerating aging." Read more o...

First time accepted submitter milbournosphere writes "It appears that GameStop has a guilty conscience. They are offering a $50 gift certificate to any person who bought the new Deus Ex at GameStop. Y...

Mr.Intel writes "A Missouri Circuit Court granted an injunction today, blocking the state law (PDF) that would ban all electronic communication between teachers and students, including their own child...

An anonymous reader writes "A new oil sheen appeared in the Gulf of Mexico last week, and now scientists have confirmed that the oil bubbling up to the surface matches the type released by BP's Deepwa...

Mark.JUK writes "Scientists working at New York's Institute of Ultrafast Spectroscopy and Lasers have discovered a new way of mapping the multiple higher channels / more complex light in an optical fi...

mike_cardwell sends in a detailed writeup of how he went about protecting a Ubuntu laptop from attacks of varying levels of sophistication, covering disk encryption, defense against cold boot attacks,...

Layzej writes with this quote from Nature:"For a century, scientists have known that charged particles from space constantly bombard Earth. Known as cosmic rays, the particles are mostly protons blast...

An anonymous reader writes "After recently running a full-page ad in the WSJ saying, 'PC gaming is not dead,' Razer has now announced a new laptop, the Blade, for the express purpose of playing video ...

An anonymous reader writes "Who says that only big, militaristic states are capable of manned space flight? The BBC reports on an attempt by Chris Nsamba to build what he hopes would be the first ...

An anonymous reader writes "An international cybercrime gang stole $13 million from a Florida-based financial institution earlier this year, by executing a highly-coordinated heist in which thieves us...

brothke writes "During the 1990's when Kevin Mitnick was on the run, a cadre of people were employed to find him and track him down. Anyone who could have an angle on Mitnick was sought after by the m...

Harperdog writes "This article details how GPS can help detect secret nuclear tests, giving the US more reason to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Here's a quote about the 2009 North Korea te...

Nrbelex writes "A team at the University of Michigan and Microsoft Research has uncovered, for the first time, the frequently suboptimal network practices of more than 100 cellular carriers. By recrui...

Hitting the front page for the first time, earlytime writes "VMware released vSphere 5 yesterday. After much publicity about its new licensing scheme, techies worldwide get to take the new release for...

RogueyWon writes "Eurogamer reports some encouraging news for console-bound fans of online shooters. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the new stand-alone version of the wildly successful Half-Life mo...

jjp9999 writes "Anyone looking for the video clip showing the Chinese regime launching cyberattacks using script kiddie tactics was greeted with a message stating 'Error Page — This page does no...

In his first accepted submission, Anon8---) writes "As published on nature.com, a process called electrowetting, 'in which a conductive liquid droplet, placed on an electrode, is physically deformed b...

MrSeb writes "Smashing all known records by some margin, IBM Research Almaden, California, has developed hardware and software technologies that will allow it to strap together 200,000 hard drives to ...

alphadogg tips this IDG News report: "'I forward this file to you for review. Please open and view it.' As a ploy to get a hapless EMC recruiter to open up a booby-trapped Excel spreadsheet, it may no...

chill sends this quote from a news release by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory:"A supernova discovered yesterday is closer to Earth — approximately 21 million light-years away—tha...

An anonymous reader writes "Marcia Hofmann, senior staff attorney at the EFF, gives more information on the first known seizure of equipment in the U.S. due to a warrant executed against a private ind...

angry tapir writes "Facebook has proven to be one of the biggest dangers in keeping undercover police officers safe, due to applications such as facial recognition and photo tagging, according to a ad...

An anonymous reader writes "In the ever lasting contest for the most idiotic lawsuit, RealNetworks has sued a Dutch man for posting a link to a competing freeware program that allegedly infringes on R...

harrymcc writes "After reading a ton of stories about Steve Jobs' decision to step down as Apple's CEO, I turned the clock back and read a bunch about the first time he did so — unwillingly &mda...

retroworks writes "According to a story in Digitimes, Acer chairman JT Wang is predicting the end of 'tablet fever.' 'Commenting on tablet PC's impact on the notebook industry, [Acer chairman JT Wang]...

alphadogg writes "MIT researchers have devised a protocol to flummox man-in-the-middle attacks against wireless networks. The all-software solution lets wireless radios automatically pair without the ...

An anonymous reader writes "After years of focusing on further improving KDE4 two weeks ago the developers of the free desktop announced the next big step for their project: KDE Frameworks 5.0. But as...

bs0d3 writes "As part of an emerging international trend to try to 'civilize the Internet', one of the world's worst Internet law treaties — the highly controversial Council of Europe (CoE) Conv...

First time accepted submitter EponymousCustard writes "On a day of big resignations, we also hear that Troy Dawson of the Scientific Linux project is joining Red Hat, and will no longer be working on ...

HairyNevus writes "A recent survey of pulsars has revealed a fascinating discovery of a millisecond pulsar in system PSR J17191438 that has stripped a nearby white dwarf star down to its very core. Al...

An anonymous reader writes "I went to Best Buy the other day to get a new laptop for a client. I didn't realize till I got it home that they had broken the seal and opened the box. They put a sticker ...

JohnBert writes with this news from ComputerWorld, which reports that "Twitter is slowly turning on automatic encryption on its website, a move following other major providers of web-based services to...

eparker05 writes "Researchers at University of Liverpool have used a scanning tunneling microscope to image the aromatic molecule pentacene (Abstract). Not unexpectedly, the resulting images showed an...

jfruhlinger writes "Hurricane Irene is bearing down on the heavily populated U.S. Northeast Corridor. If you work in IT, you know that there are few things that are worse for electronics than water; s...

With CmdrTaco moving on to his temporary retirement home, the Slashdot editors who will continue to poke and prod at reader submissions (the heart and soul of this site: without readers, there'd be no...

First time accepted submitter chefmayhem writes "I'm one of a number of volunteer alumni trying to revive a high school summer science enrichment program, PGSS, cut unceremoniously by Pennsylvania in ...

An anonymous reader writes "Michael Mann, a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University, was one of the central figures involved in the 'Climategate' controversy, which saw many private email conve...

jrepin writes "One midsummer's night, a student at the University of Helsinki posted a query to the newsgroup comp.os.minix asking, 'What would you like to see most in minix?' The student's name w...

DMandPenfold writes "The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the US financial regulator, has been accused of destroying thousands of data files on high profile inquiries including an early-stage...

decora writes "Several years ago, writer Du Daobin posted several essays on the internet, protesting such things as unfair taxes and the corruption of the media. He was then charged with 'inciting sub...

Joining the ranks of accepted submitters, HumanEmulator writes "The NY Times reports on how the Hollywood summer-movie business model is being applied to tech products: 'Every release needs to be a bl...

After 14 years and over 15,000 stories posted, it's finally time for me to say Good-Bye to Slashdot. I createdthis place with my best friends in a run down house while still in college. Since then it ...

Hugh Pickens writes "Social awkwardness has the most opportunity to shine in your very first message to a potential sweetheart, write Andrea Bartz and Brenna Ehrlich at CNN. Bartz and Ehrlich enumerat...

jfruhlinger writes "A Dutch court came to some interesting conclusions in the Apple-Samsung patent case raging there. The court rejected claims that Samsung stole intellectual copyrights, or that it s...

donniebaseball23 writes "Sony's virtual world, PlayStation Home, has seen over 23 million users since launching in December 2008, and now the service is about to undergo its biggest change yet. Jack B...

An anonymous reader writes "The Australian government instructed a committee to investigate required changes to cybercrime legislation. Having received the report, the government decide to ignore it a...

kkleiner writes "How much would you pay for a piece of imaginary real estate? Anshe Chung has made millions renting it. Today, Anshe Chung Studios has 80+ employees managing thousands of rent...

JohnBert writes "A German privacy protection authority is calling on organizations there to close their Facebook fan pages and remove the social networking site's 'Like' button from their websites, ar...

GMGruman writes "After five years of a torturous political process and now under the new ownership of Oracle, Java SE 7 is finally out (and its initial bugs patched in the Update 1 release). So what d...

First time accepted submitter CoveredTrax writes "As part of the beta test of their new gigabit fiber network, Google has provided Stanford University with mouthwateringly high-speed Internet. Since t...

CWmike writes "Developers of the Apache open-source project warned users of the Web server software on Wednesday that a denial-of-service (DoS) tool is circulating that exploits a bug in the program. ...

An anonymous reader writes "The title says it all, really; Steve Jobs has resigned as the CEO of Apple, and would like to become Chairman of the Board. Reasons are not specified, but his declining hea...

First time accepted submitter techtribune writes "NASA is in the process of developing a new technology under project Laser Communications Relay Demonstration or LCRD which will allow them to provide ...

Mr_Blank writes "New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has made it clear that he wants to see more traffic light cameras in the Big Apple, saying that he'd have the devices on every street corner if p...

DisKurzion writes "A leaked GameStop memo indicates that employees are to open the regular PC release of Dues Ex: Human Revolution and discard the included OnLive coupon. From the article: 'GameStop s...

Hugh Pickens writes "Christopher Williams writes that the success of HP's fire sale in unloading hundreds of thousands of TouchPads at heavily discounted prices may provide clues to other Apple compet...

Toe, The writes "Of particular concern to couch potatoes, gamers, and anyone who spends an inordinate amount of time sitting and staring at a screen is how little exercise can I do and still receive a...

An anonymous reader writes "Ticketmaster has added Facebook integration to its interactive seat maps. The new feature allows you to share your live event plans by tagging yourself into your seat, and ...

clm1970 writes "Researcher Simon Barone-Cohen has put forth the theory that 'how we mate and marry' could explain the increase in rates of Autism Spectrum Disorders particularly Asperger's. When two t...

MTCicero writes "The BBC has an interesting if not apocalyptic take on the spread of algorithms into everyday life. Perhaps the author should have spent a little more time discussing how algorithms in...

bonch writes "Pilots of United and Continental will ditch flight manuals and charts in favor of 11,000 iPads containing the same data in app form. Replacing 38 pounds of paper materials, the iPads wil...

MrSeb writes "Ahh, the Windows Explorer progress dialog. For years it has been struggling to figure out how to calculate how long our copy and delete operations would take, sliding the progress bar ba...

First time accepted submitter Oxford_Comma_Lover writes "The Russian cargo spacecraft 'Progress' developed problems and burned up in the atmosphere shortly after its launch at 1300 GMT. From the artic...

bonch writes "As expected, Google will pay the government $500 million to settle a criminal probe into whether or not they profited from the display of ads from illegal online pharmacies. Google had v...

Thorfinn.au says "Scientists using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have discovered the coldest class of star-like bodies, with temperatures as cool as the human body. Astro...

dtmos wrote in to say that "This summer, StarCraft II has become the newest bar room spectator sport. Fans organize so-called Barcraft events, taking over pubs and bistros from Honolulu to Florida and...

wiredmikey writes "In its most recent intelligence report, Symantec researchers reported a massive increase in the amount of boot time malware striking users, noting there have already been as many ne...

First time accepted submitter chrisl456 writes "MakerBot Industries, makers (hah!) of 3D printers / personal fabrication devices, just got a big boost in the form of $10 million from an 'all-star line...

DeviceGuru writes to note that "Robonaut 2 (aka R2), the first humanoid robot to become a permanent resident of the International Space Station (ISS), was awakened from stasis this week after six mont...

An anonymous reader writes "Last week, an appeals court ruling opened the door to making it easier to kill software patents. It turns out that the guy whose name was on the actual patent didn't even r...

Hugh Pickens writes "As schools return to session in South Dakota, more than one-fourth of students in the state will only be in class from Monday through Thursday as budget constraints lead school di...

NaklsonofNakkl writes "The Portal series was an amazing blend of gameplay, storytelling and puzzles, which left players wishing there was a portal gun they could use in real life. A recent YouTube vid...

jfruhlinger writes "Verizon Wireless has revamped its video service; many Android phones can now stream full episodes from a number of current TV shows. You can even choose to just buy access for a da...

An anonymous reader writes "An anonymous robot operator at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant has kept a blog describing in candid detail his day-to-day life at the crippled facility, including robot tra...

Calidreth writes "At Gamescom last week two of Sony's executives stated their belief that in merely ten years' time, video games will have the ability to read more than just movement on the part of th...

sciencehabit writes "Whether or not they believe in God, evolutionary biologists may need to pay closer mind to religion. That's because religious beliefs can shape key behaviors in ways that evolutio...

Barence writes "Smartphones are replacing PCs as the new breeding ground for pre-installed crapware, argues Mike Jennings. The Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro, for example, comes pre-loaded with McAfee ...

Last month we discussed news that the James Webb Space Telescope, the planned successor to the HST, is on the budgetary chopping block. Now, an anonymous reader points out hopeful news from TPM's Idea...

suraj.sun and several other readers sent word that Samsung is using a clip from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example of prior art in its defense against Apple's patent infringement cl...

Front page first-timer poena.dare writes"The government sought warrantless access to 113 days of location data for a Verizon Wireless customer. On Monday, a judge refused the request (PDF), ruling tha...

An anonymous reader writes "In what could easily be one of the boldest infrastructure developments ever announced, the Russian Government has given the go-ahead to build a transcontinental railway lin...

CWmike writes "Facebook is making a series of design changes to the site to make it clearer to users who can see the content that they post, an issue Google has been criticizing Facebook about since i...

Joining the posted submitter club, suasfan22 writes with a bit in Wired about the use of a drone by Libyan Rebels. From the article: "The Libyan revolutionaries are more of a band of enthusiastic amat...

AdamWill writes "Fedora 16 Alpha is released today, featuring GNOME 3.1.4 with a unified input indicator for keyboard layouts and input methods, KDE 4.7, GRUB 2 on new installations (with GPT disk lab...

swandives writes "More in the Oracle/Google patent infringement saga. Oracle says no court has ever found that APIs for software like Java are ineligible for copyright protection. The claims were made...

bs0d3 writes "Instead of waking up to a regular alarm clock, TalkO'Clock will let others help you get out of bed. The service allows you to choose whether you want to be called by a male or a female s...

An anonymous reader writes "A Chinese military propaganda video aired in mid-July inadvertently showed a Chinese military university launching cyberattacks against U.S. websites. The Epoch Times repor...

Joining the ranks of accepted submitters, Gaygirlie writes "Michael Robertson, the owner and founder of the MP3Tunes music locker service, has been locked in a copyright infringement case with EMI Rec...

At 1:51 p.m. EDT a 5.8 magnitude earth quake hit Northern Virginia. Initial reports indicate it was felt from Virginia to Massachusetts. The USGS has confirmed the quake and has a nifty map of reporte...

utkonos writes "After decades of pondering, scientists have found the secret to the creation of lager. An elusive species of yeast isolated in the forests of Argentina was key to the invention of the ...

In his main page debut, ramereth writes with a look at the infrastructure of OSUOSL from Linux.com. From the article: "Many people use Linux in many ways, often totally unaware that they're depending ...

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has an idea how it can bridge the gap between native apps and web applications: WebAPI will developed as a set of HTML5 APIs and deliver consistent, web-based appli...

alphadogg says "With the market flush with hot-selling tablet computers, it shouldn't bowl anyone over to learn that many users are taking the plunge and bringing their devices to the bathroom. Accord...

decora writes "In a recent article on Al-Jazeera, Jillian York of the EFF speculates about the true nature of the Syrian 'hackers' who defaced AnonPlus. She references a University of Toronto analysis...

Over 11 years ago, Deus Ex became one of the most celebrated games of its time, tightly weaving FPS and RPG gameplay together with a rich cyberpunk story. Today, Eidos Montreal and Square Enix launche...

swandives writes "Imagine what would happen if all the Google engineers turned rogue and held the world's Gmail accounts to ransom. Or if aliens attacked earth and wiped California off the map. Seems ...

An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix is reporting that The GIMP now has a working single-window mode, a long desired feature by the open-source graphics community to be more competitive with Adobe Pho...

GMGruman wrote in to say "Microsoft embarrassed itself last week when it got caught using 'zombie cookies' — a form of tracking cookies that users can't delete, as they come back to life after y...

quarterbuck writes "Bloomberg has a story on Google's acquisition of Motorola and quotes IP lawyers who claim that 18 patents dating to 1994 are probably what Google is after. These patents cover tech...

An anonymous reader writes "The MK-1 Robotic Arm from HDT Global comes from a DARPA sponsored project to create a highly advanced prosthetic limb. The disco dance moves shown at the beginning of this ...

Hugh Pickens writes "Polls by Gallup and the Pew Research Center find that four out of 10 Americans believe humanity descend from Adam and Eve, but NPR reports that evangelical scientists are now sayi...

NicknamesAreStupid writes "As fast as you can say '$99 blowout sale,' PC World reports an Android port to the now defunct HP TouchPad. 'Of course, it will turn out to be the best Android pad ever, mak...

hypnosec writes "Israel's Justice Ministry has decided to give its approval to Google's Street View services to feature 360 degree images of the country's streets, according to a new, confirmed report...

angry tapir writes "Internet connectivity was restored in Tripoli late Sunday local time, as rebel forces took control of many parts of the capital city of Libya. A new mobile network set up by the re...

An anonymous reader writes "Evolution has ossified the middle layers of the Internet, leaving it vulnerable but security breaches could be countered by diversification of protocols, according to Georg...

Trailrunner7 writes "The maintainers of the PHP scripting language are warning users about a serious crypto problem in the latest release and advising them not to upgrade to PHP 5.3.7 until the bug is...

conner_bw writes "Twitter has confirmed that it will meet with the UK Home Secretary on Thursday, after being called in for discussions over the role it played in the recent UK riots. Twitter will sen...

protoshell writes "'Software patents in Europe could be validated with a central patent court,' warns Richard Stallman in an article published in the Guardian. After the rejection of the software pate...

cdance writes "Traditional Lava Lamps, and of course email, are the tools of choice to notify your dev team that the build in your continuous integration system is broken. However, lava lamps, just li...

oxide7 writes "Presidential candidate Rick Perry underwent a controversial stem-cell treatment this past month, prompting some doctors to fear the high-profile event would send the wrong signal to des...

gbrumfiel writes "Last month, scientists reported a number of 'excess events' that could be caused by the appearance of the long-sought Higgs boson inside the LHC. But it looks like they'll have to pu...

svenski writes "Atari User reports that Atari Inc. have begun to target the retro community and have now turned their attentions to atari2600.org, a website first registered in 2000, demanding the dom...

CWmike writes "Taking advantage of Hewlett-Packard's departure from the tablet and smartphone market, Microsoft has offered webOS developers free phones, tools and training to create apps for Windows ...

First time accepted submitter Is Any Nickname Left writes "The Washington Post has an article on school systems with their own police forces. It focuses on Texas, which has the highest number of 'Scho...

MrSeb writes "At Download.com, page designs have been repeatedly tweaked over the years to push its updater software (now called TechTracker), TrialPay offers, and the site's mailing list. Bothersome,...

jfruhlinger writes "We've already seen claims from Edward Naughton and Florian Mueller that most Android distributors are in violation of the GPL — claims that the open source community has, for...

sciencehabit writes "Researchers say they have discovered the fossils of 3.4-billion-year-old cells in between the cemented sand grains of an ancient beach in Western Australia, possibly the oldest fo...

An anonymous reader writes "The Wall Street Journal reports on a study into productivity and efficiency in the workplace, which found that people who are given a break to surf the web return to their ...

Thanks to Google and the Foundation for a Sustainable Amazon (FAS), your days of paddling up and down the Amazon basin looking for a fishing camp are over. Google is expanding its Street View service ...

An anonymous reader writes "An article at the NY Times discusses the awkwardness of Google's recent purchase of Motorola Mobility, an acquisition widely thought to be motivated by Android patent conce...

JohnBert sends this excerpt from and IDG report:"The politically oriented hacking group Anonymous has released 1GB of what it says are private e-mails and documents from an executive of a U.S. defense...

KentuckyFC writes "Various astronomers have studied how far rocks can travel through space after being ejected from Earth. Their conclusion is that it's relatively easy for bits of Earth to end up on ...

tekgoblin writes "A very important and functional feature has been added to Apple's iOS 5 for Japanese users: an earthquake warning system. This new feature may allow the people of Japan to be warned ...

theodp writes "Ever wonder why all those job listings for Amazon subsidiary Lab126 — the internal group behind the Kindle and, by all accounts, an upcoming Android tablet — have travel req...

An anonymous reader writes "State Governor Jay Nixon recently signed Senate Bill 54, making it illegal for students and teachers to be friends online as of later this month. Now, a Missouri teachers g...

tvlinux writes "Antarctica is a big continent, so mapping all of its ice flow isn't exactly a piece of cake. But for the first time scientists have been able to get the complete picture of the souther...

GeekTech.in writes "The Tacit, a wrist mounted sonar device with haptic feedback, is like strapping a bat to your wrist to help you see. It makes use of two sonar ping sensors to measure the distance ...

An anonymous reader writes "GE's 'Copper Man' is a quarter-inch-thick, electroplated copper mannequin from the early '40s that the Army used to evaluate the thermal-insulating quality of protective cl...

An anonymous reader writes "The Hugo Award is the leading prize for excellence in the field of science fiction and fantasy writing. Named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of Amazing Stories magazine,...

mikejuk writes "Following on the recent Slashdot item on the availability of a free Stanford AI course there is news that two other Stanford Computer Science courses are also joining in this 'bold exp...

bs0d3 writes "Former Wikileaks spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg claims to have destroyed more than 3,500 unpublished files that had been sent from unknown informants and are now apparently lost irrevoc...

theodp writes "CNET reports that rather than backing down after complaints about its insistence that Google+ user accounts be opened under a real name, Google has upped the ante and will pin 'ver...

An anonymous reader writes "Verizon today announced that the approximately 45,000 wireline employees represented by the CWA and IBEW that have been on strike will return to work beginning Monday night...

theodp writes "In his Centennial Conversation at the Computer History Museum, IBM CEO Sam Palmisano emphasized the importance of investing in R&D, even in a down economy. 'Shareholder expectations...

An anonymous reader writes "The IT industry is a lot different than it was 10 years ago; it underwent a huge boom in terms of labor and services required to keep up with the times. Now, we are enterin...

An anonymous reader writes with news that 25,000 staff across 13 hospitals in Denmark will be switching to LibreOffice over the course of the next year."The group of hospitals is phasing out a proprie...

GNUman writes "Maybe soon we'll be able to genetically modify humans so that a specific action (e.g., tapping your nose, pinching your ear) triggers the release of THC directly from your own cells. Fr...

jfruhlinger writes with news that Research In Motion will soon jump into the music service market. The service will be available through BlackBerry Messenger, and will offer users 50 songs for $5/mont...

An anonymous reader writes "Sony has announced the hardware specs for the PS Vita and the details have confirmed most fans' hopes instead of their fears. The heart of the system is an ARM-developed Co...

In his first accepted submission, bs0d3 writes "A judge in Argentina ordered ISPs to block two websites — leakymails.com and leakymails.blogspot.com. According to Google, many ISPs have simply b...

An anonymous reader writes "The Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) is looking for smart volunteers to donate their genes for analysis. They are seeking subjects with high intelligence; you can only qual...

mask.of.sanity writes "Data can be stolen from Windows, Android and Apple devices by unassuming power charging towers. In an attack demonstrated at the Defcon hacking conference, mobile phone charging...

destinyland writes "Amazon has begun signing their own authors and then publishing the books themselves, leaving booksellers 'wary' as Amazon 'tries to have it all,' according to a Boston newspaper. T...

Hugh Pickens writes "According to an article by Tony Bradley, news is spreading quickly online that HP is going to clear out its vast TouchPad inventory by dropping the price to an offer you can't ref...

dynamo52 writes "I have been tasked with replacing a managed Wi-Fi system for a mid-sized hotel. They have already selected Comcast to provide a 100mbps connection, which unfortunately must come in at...

An anonymous reader writes "Web browser pioneer Marc Andreessen writes in the Wall Street Journal that software is 'eating the world.' He argues that software's importance to the economy is being unde...

gzipped_tar writes "A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that a public high school teacher in Mission Viejo, California may not be sued for making hostile remarks about religion in his classroom. T...

theodp writes "In NASCAR, you can finish a race in the Top 3 by leading the whole way or by having spectacular crashes take out those ahead of you. The same may hold true for the tablet race, where Ap...

Trailrunner7 writes "In response to work by Stanford University researchers who found that Microsoft and several other high-profile companies were using a controversial technique to keep persistent co...

Hugh Pickens writes "Google search anthropologist Dan Russell says that 90 percent of people in his studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page. 'I do ...

CharlyFoxtrot writes "Haiku OS, the open source reimplementation of BeOS celebrated its tenth birthday this week. 'Ten years ago today, the first post appeared on the mailing list of our project &mdas...

Cutting_Crew writes "I am sure many of us have heard about this story, but it looks like Spaceport America is finally ready to take off (no pun intended). The latest construction pictures [Note: datab...

jfruhlinger writes "It seems that Apple can't stop Photoshopping evidence in its EU lawsuit against Samsung. We already saw that the company used trickery in its side-by-side comparison of the iPad an...

Mr_Perl writes "Linux Journal sent out an email to subscribers today announcing that they are going 100% digital. Subscribers signed on for a paper version of the journal, and now have been switched t...

MojoKid writes "Multiple manufacturers in the IT industry have been keeping a wary eye on China's decision to cut back on rare earth exports and the impact it may have on component prices. There have ...

CWmike writes "With HP spinning off its PC business, rivals will be looking for a way to get a bigger piece of the hardware pie. HP's PC unit news, among other industry-rattling announcements, includi...

cylonlover writes "Last year, researchers developed a cancer-detecting electronic nose inspired by dogs' ability to sniff out different types of ovarian cancer. Now a new study has found that sniffer ...

We recently discussed Ubisoft's plans to bring back their controversial always-connected DRM for their upcoming racing game Driver: San Francisco. Gamers raised their voices in protest, and it seems U...

mrtr writes "A number of car makers are looking at whether EEG devices built into headrests could prevent accidents by sensing when a driver is in danger of drifting off. The technology comes from Neu...

olsmeister writes "In a follow-up to a report that was mentioned on Slashdot a week ago, the NOAA has determined that the orange 'goo' that washed up on the beaches at the remote Alaska village of Kiv...

itwbennett writes "Having just announced that it would continue to run Android on its best phones, HTC is now 'needling' Google by making good on 'promises it made earlier in the year to deliver bootl...

dtjohnson writes "A newly published study (abstract) predicts that solar storms are going to become increasingly disruptive to satellites and communications in the coming decades as the sun cycles tow...

Front page first-timer crdotson writes "Linus said in an interview that he thinks virtualization is 'evil' because he prefers to deal with the real hardware. Hardware virtualization allows for better ...

thatpythonguy writes "Addison-Wesley publishers has released The Python Standard Library By Example, another Python book that strategically fits in between programming cookbooks and library reference ...

nk497 writes "A single photograph, scraps of circuit diagrams drawn from memory and a pile of disused components – it isn't much to go on, but from such meager beginnings, engineers rebuilt one ...

holy_calamity writes "A technology will be appearing soon in TVs that fingerprints what is onscreen and sends that information to an internet server able to identify the content, whether it's live TV ...

MrSeb writes "With the latest Windows 8 build (8064) that has been delivered to Intel, it's clear that the company is taking strides to make sure that its upcoming OS isn't quit so easy to pirate. For...

An anonymous reader sends word that the first Firefox 7.0 beta has been released. One of the big areas of focus for this version will be performance enhancements. One optimization "Reduces memory use ...

PHPNerd writes "You might expect that science, particularly American science, would be color-blind. Though fewer people from some of the country's ethnic minorities are scientists than the proportions...

Hugh Pickens writes "AT&T is scrapping its 1,000-texts-for-ten-bucks plan and replacing it with a plan that offers unlimited texts for $20. Users who don't want the unlimited plan can opt to pay 2...

GMGruman writes "Bill Snyder warns that the tech patent wars are going nuclear, and could vaporize tech jobs in the process. He likens the situation to medicine, where so much money now goes to pay fo...

Wouldn't it be easier to learn Chinese from a native speaker than from a book, or explore a religion from an actual practitioner rather than words on a page? A library in Surrey, B.C. thinks so an...

wisebabo writes "Researchers in China have proposed sending a solar sail-driven probe to hit the asteroid Apophis to make sure it has no chance of going through a 'keyhole' near earth in 2029. If it g...

JohnBert writes "Google issued a new study (PDF) on Wednesday detailing how it is becoming more difficult to identify malicious websites and attacks, with antivirus software proving to be an ineffecti...

KiloByte joins the ranks of accepted submitters, writing "To appease 'morality' watchdogs, Wikipedia is contemplating the introduction of a censorship feature, where images would be flagged for contai...

An anonymous reader tips news of 7th grader Aidan Dwyer, who used phyllotaxis — the way leaves are arranged on plant stems in nature — as inspiration to arrange an array of solar panels in...

Teancum writes "RKK Energia, the prime contractor for the Russian space program and the company who builds the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, recently confirmed negotiations are underway with space tourism...

astroengine writes with an amusing piece in Discovery. From the article: "In a study carried out by NASA and Pennsylvania State University scientists, several intelligent extraterrestrial encounter sc...

HansonMB writes with an interview in Motherboard.tv. From the article: "Social media isn't just great for starting 'social unrest,' it's proving to be quite helpful for quashing it too. Not long after...

daria42 writes "This week it was revealed that Apple has still not responded to Australia's Federal Parliament on the issue of why the prices of its products are significantly higher in Australia than...

donniebaseball23 writes "Sony, after nearly two years on standing firm on PS3's price, dropped the console to $249, and it's been having an immediate impact. GameStop has already noted a 'significant'...

In his first accepted submission, fwarren writes "Alcon Entertainment, best known for the movie The Blind Side purchased the rights to Blade Runner earlier this year. The next order of business? H...

Landing his first accepted submission, qpgmr writes "AES, generally thought to be the gold standard for encryption, is showing weaknesses. From Computerworld: 'Researchers from Microsoft and the Dutch...

tekgoblin writes with a quick bit about new words in the COED. From the article: "Concise Oxford English Dictionary is the smaller but most widely recognized derivative of the official Oxford English ...

dtmos writes "DARPA has announced that its Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 flight on Thursday, 11 August, 'experienced a flight anomaly post perigee and into the vehicle's climb. The anomaly pr...

An anonymous reader writes "I love the idea of getting an ebook reader primarily for reading research journal papers. However I've heard bad things about the handling of pdf's on the major ones. I don...

OverTheGeicoE writes "The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a Freedom of Information Act request last year (PDF) with the US Department of Homeland Security, whose Transportation Security Ad...

An anonymous reader writes "Creating a flexible display requires finding an organic material that's both durable and capable of carrying an electric signal fast enough. To create such a material requi...

An anonymous reader writes "A bill being considered by the Canadian federal parliament includes two clauses specifically to reduce the 'due process' imposed when the police need information from ISPs....

A number of readers submitted rumors about a few announcements HP was to make today. Now that has actually happened and the news looks grim. For starters they are exiting the tablet and phone market a...

Zothecula writes with an amusing article in Gizmag. From the article: "The greater share of the value of any significant collector car is in the provenance — who sat in the seat before you, and ...

An anonymous reader writes "While software patents are still legal, it appears that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, sometimes known as the nation's 'patent court' has just made a decisio...

An anonymous reader writes with an article on a recent patent application by Apple. From the article: "Apple likes thin devices and considers the depth of the iPod, iPhone and iPad as critical compone...

snydeq writes with an editorial in Networld World about the resurgence of native code. From the article: "Modern programmers have increasingly turned away from native compilation in favor of managed-c...

jbrodkin writes "Linux and ARM developers have clashed over what's been described as a 'United Nations-level complexity of the forks in the ARM section of the Linux kernel.' Linus Torvalds addressed t...

An anonymous reader writes "Executives from China Mobile have reportedly met with Apple CEO Steve Jobs a number of times to discuss introducing an iPhone model compliant with China Mobile's proprietar...

Apocryphos writes "The government agency that helped invent the Internet now wants to do the same for travel to the stars. In what is perhaps the ultimate startup opportunity, DARPA, the Defense Advan...

cylonlover writes "While space tourism efforts by the likes of Space Adventures and Virgin Galactic are relying on the tried and true technology of rockets to launch paying customers into space, Barce...

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at IBM have created microchips inspired by the basic functioning of the human brain. They believe the chips could perform task that humans excel at but computer...

nonprofiteer writes "Derwent Capital, a new hedge fund that makes trades and investments based on Twitter sentiment, beat the market--and other hedge funds--in its first full month of trading. From th...

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Blake Snow writes that according to one expert, 90% of players who start a game will never see the end of it and it's not just dull games that go unfinished. Only 10% of av...

theodp writes "In purchasing Motorola Mobility, Slate's Farhad Manjoo reports that Google will also come into possession of one the nation's biggest suppliers of set-top boxes. So, can Google work som...

belmolis writes "Here in Canada we have an old-fashioned paper ballot voting system that by all accounts works very well. We get results quickly and without fraud. Nonetheless, Elections Canada wants ...

jkcity writes "The ban on sales of Samsung 10.1 tablet in the EU has been lifted everywhere except Germany. The new ruling is in effect until August 25th while it is decided if the original court had ...

An anonymous reader writes "In addition to the 12 arrest from last week, a judge has sentenced 20-year-old Jordan Blackshaw and 22-year-old Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan to four years in prison for their fai...

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Bob Lewis argues that while the iPad may be opening IT's eyes to a new way to encourage end-users to innovate new solutions for their organizations, that work will better be...

An anonymous reader writes "Being a competitive Scrabble player apparently warps your brain, in a good way, according to researchers at the University of Calgary in Canada. At the high level of the ga...

An anonymous reader writes "Engineers at UCLA have developed technology that allows gadgets like smartphones and laptops to convert sunlight, ambient light, and their own backlight into energy. Equipp...

TaeKwonDood writes "Analysis of a piece of lunar rock brought back to Earth by the Apollo 16 mission in 1972 has shown that the Moon may be much younger than previously believed. Researchers say that ...

CWmike writes "A U.S. trade judge has rejected Google's move to block the testimony of a Microsoft expert witness in the dispute with Motorola over patents allegedly used by Android. Last week, Google...

MrSeb writes "In the time of Socrates, Plato and Cicero, great minds came together in local forums or sophist schools. The Enlightenment of the 18th century was triggered by homely gatherings at salon...

An anonymous reader writes "There is already a Virtual Physiological Human project going on in Europe, to program a simulated human that can serve as a guinea pig, but this National Institute of Healt...

Zothecula writes "Human beings may have only discovered how to create the one-atom-thick sheets of carbon atoms known as graphene in 2004 but it appears the universe could have been churning out the s...

MrSeb writes "Researchers at the University of Michigan have created a running, obstacle-scaling robot. This robot, which is called MABEL (not an acronym), is capable of running at speeds of up to 3.0...

Vrallis writes "As reported recently, Mojang AB, the creators of Minecraft, have been sued by Bethesda over the name of their latest project, Scrolls, citing a trademark infringement with their Elder ...

An anonymous reader writes "In an extensive interview, GNOME 3 designer Jon McCann talks about the future of GNOME 3 — why it's all about the apps and why he is convinced that KDE and Ubuntu are...

roccomaglio writes "The suspect who is accused of planning to bomb his high school in Tampa updated his Facebook status with the following: 'The weirdest thing happened today...when my homie Nic Peezy...

jfruhlinger writes "You may have already forgotten the iPhone location-tracking furor, but 27,000 South Koreans haven't! They (or the lawyers recruiting them) have launched a class action suit against...

MojoKid writes "id Software's long-awaited FPS, Rage, is set to ship in October. When it launches, Rage will be the first game to feature id's newest graphics engine, dubbed id Tech 5. id Tech 5 has e...

DeviceGuru writes "All keynote sessions from the LinuxCon North America 2011 conference held in Vancouver this week are being made available for free public streaming today through Friday (August 17-1...

Trailrunner7 writes "There has been a huge spike in spam volume in the last few days, including a massive amount of malicious spam with infected attachments, and researchers say that levels of junk ma...

dkd903 noticed another amusing shot in the battle between G+ and Facebook. CNN is running a story where Facebook's director of game partnership Sean Ryan basically says Google+ has no users....

coondoggie writes "The comet Elenin, which will pass by Earth October 16, has generated such an inordinate amount of doomsday reports from a number of different sources that NASA today issued a releas...

wiredmikey writes "Sometimes hacking is about money; other times, it's about competition, and when that happens, it is also about getting a little credit. Enter RankMyHack.com. The site is described a...

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from UCSD have demonstrated how thermal imagery cameras can be used tosteal customers' PINs (PDF) when you withdraw cash from ATMs. Their paper, entitled 'Heat ...

An anonymous reader writes "Last week, Facebook said it found the original 'authentic contract' between Mark Zuckerberg and Paul Ceglia, a man that claims he owns half of the company over a 2003 contr...

toybuilder writes "It took nearly 80 years for the first 1 million patents to issue in the U.S. On Tuesday, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued its eighth-million patent. This most recent 1 mi...

An anonymous reader writes "Security researchers have unearthed a piece of malware that mints a digital currency known as Bitcoins by harnessing the immense power of an infected machine's graphical pr...

RockDoctor writes "Reports indicate that a suspect has been arrested in the Australian 'collar bomb' hostage/extortion case. The allegation is that the suspect had set up a Gmail account, through whic...

itwbennett writes "Using a secret vSphere console, Jason Cornish, formerly an IT staffer at the U.S. subsidiary of drug-maker Shionogi, wiped out most of the company's computer infrastructure earlier ...

bonch writes "After seven years and a highpoint of 12 million subscribers, World of Warcraft has seen a loss of nearly one million subscribers in the last six months for the first time in its history,...

kkleiner writes "Earlier this year, the Chinese firm Huawei unveiled IDEOS through Kenya's telecom titan, Safaricom. So far, this $80 smartphone has found its way into the hands of 350,000+ Kenya...

angry tapir writes "Australia's federal Opposition will look to create a national government-funded 'electronic pigeon hole' for all Australians in an effort to cut the costs of 'snail mail' communica...

An anonymous reader sends this snippet from an AFP report:"California-based rocket maker SpaceX said that it will make a test flight in late November to the International Space Station, now that NASA ...

crookedvulture writes "Crytek made news earlier this summer by releasing a big DirectX 11 update for the PC version of its latest game, Crysis 2. Among other things, the update added extensive tessell...

souravzzz writes "As the mass-lawsuits against BitTorrent users in the United States drag on, detail on the collateral damage this extortion-like scheme is costing becomes clear. It is likely that tho...

wiredmikey writes "Amazon Web Services today announced 'AWS GovCloud,' a new AWS Region designed to allow U.S. government agencies and contractors to move IT applications and systems into the cloud by...

bonch writes "Pundits have been analyzing Google's Motorola acquisition since its announcement. Dan Lyons, formerly known as Fake Steve Jobs, says Google never cared for the Nortel patents, and that t...

The police department of Santa Cruz, California is testing a new method for apprehending criminals: beating them to the crime scene. No, they haven't harnessed a group of pre-cogs; they're relying on ...

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from TPM's Idea Lab:"The U.S. Navy's bomb squads have a weight problem. To keep their field gear powered up, the typical explosive ordnance disposal unit has to ...

jfruhlinger writes '-stable' is the term for the current Linux release most suitable for general use; but as Linux moves into more and more niches, there's a need for a kernel more stable than -stable...

MadMartigan2001 writes with a pretty crazy article on a project involving floating libertarian paradises. From the article: "PayPal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has given $1.25 mill...

An anonymous reader writes with a press release on the App Inventor Weblog. From the release: "MIT announced the launch of the new Center for Mobile Learning, with a first activity being to take over ...

Orome1 writes with an article in Net Security. From the article: "Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 has proved once again to be the best choice when it comes to catching attacks aimed at making the user...

Okian Warrior writes "After taking heat from the ACLU and being hacked by Anonymous for shutting down cellphone service to four stations last week, BART kept cell service on during Monday's protests. ...

An anonymous reader writes "The world's first nuclear barge has been impounded while still under construction — but not because of looming safety or environmental concerns. The shipyard's parent...

Em Adespoton writes "At DEFCON this year, Moxie Marlinspike gave an excellent presentation ... showing how broken the current SSL certification model is and proposing a replacement. Naked Security add...

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Steve Green writes that ... Righthaven, the Las Vegas copyright troll, won't be collecting any damages from a man it once branded as a copyright infringer but instead must ...

Samfer writes "On Friday August 12th 2011, the results for the final ISO ballot on C++0x came in, and the ISO C++ Standards Committee were unanimous in favor of approving the new C...

A survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that people are lying 13% of the time when they say they have to take a cell phone call around you. That number jumps to an inc...

adeelarshad82 writes "In a statement released yesterday, Microsoft's Windows Phone Division President Andy Lees said 'Investing in a broad and truly open mobile ecosystem is important for the industry...

pbahra writes "When you think of product placement on television you tend to think of cumbersome 1950s examples where the actor would cheesily turn to camera and hold up, say, a bar of soap—wher...

itwbennett writes "I bet you forgot all about the JooJoo, the tablet that started life as CrunchPad and sparked a bitter fight between Michael Arrington and Fusion Garage. Well, Fusion hasn't forgotte...

An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo has partnered with Facebook to test the iconic social experiment known as 'six degrees of separation' (everyone is on average approximately six steps away from any ot...

Some nameless reader noted a surprising twist in the tale of Cyanogen, an android modder once cease and desisted by Google. "Samsung Mobile has hired one of the homebrew market's most notorious and su...

Trailrunner7 writes "Finding Aaron Barr at this year's DEFCON hacker conference in Las Vegas was like a giant game of "Where's Waldo." Given the events of the past year, you can hardly blame him for k...

An anonymous reader sends this quote from an opinion piece in the NY Times:"If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it's not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don't care as much...

snydeq writes "Peter Wayner discusses a number of hard truths Web developers must accept in making the most of HTML5 — especially those who are looking to leverage HTML5 in hopes of unseating na...

An article at the Opposable Thumbs blog looks at the struggle between portable gaming devices and smartphones with access to a plethora of inexpensive games."...most games simply have to be 'good enou...

mormop writes "The Chinese government has praised UK Prime Minister David Cameron's plan for censoring social networking sites at times when the government feels threatened, believing it legitimizes C...

Hugh Pickens writes "According to a recent study at the University of California San Diego, knowing how a book ends does not ruin its story and can actually enhance enjoyment. It suggests people may e...

coondoggie writes "This guy is the poster-child for why cell phone use in cars should be banned in more places. According to press out of the United Kingdom, a man who was driving at 70MPH while texti...

An anonymous reader writes "A police officer who was disciplined for his role in the beating of a Massachusetts man (many broken bones in his face and permanent partial blindness) is looking to bring ...

itwbennett writes "Linux has become a dominant player in finance thanks to its ability to pass messages very quickly, said Linux kernel contributor Christoph Lameter. 'The trading shops saw that the l...

An anonymous reader writes "NASA has been tasked with landing astronauts on a space rock by 2025, and on the Red Planet by the mid 2030s. To reach those goals, the United States must develop a new hea...

wiredmikey writes "The SpyEye malware kit has long been both the bane of unsuspecting victims and a boon for cyber-criminals. Now, according to security researchers, the situation may have taken a tur...

Calidreth writes "EVE Online is famous for its stories of theft, underhanded dealings, criminal empires and general unscrupulous play. For EVE players, this is generally an accepted part of the game a...

Oswald McWeany writes "Tensions between the U.S. and Pakistan have moved up a notch in light of news that Pakistan allowed China to examine the downed stealth helicopter used in the operation to kill ...

jfruhlinger writes "Patent gadfly Florian Mueller's latest post has made a fairly bold claim: that virtually all Android licensees are violating the GPL because of their failure to redistribute the co...

An anonymous reader writes "Under the banner headline 'Police reassure residents they are working to keep county safe,' Essex police proudly proclaimed that they arrested a 20-year-old man from Colche...

quarterbuck writes with this excerpt from the NY Times:"When copyright law was revised in the mid-1970s, musicians, like creators of other works of art, were granted 'termination rights,' which allow ...

An anonymous reader writes "The Dutch site webwereld.nl has found incorrect evidence submitted by Apple (Google translation of Dutch original) in the EU design-right case against Samsung. In the ex-pa...

greenrainbow writes "According to scientists, there are mussels at the bottom of the ocean that are efficiently converting hydrogen into energy in their very own, nature-made hydrogen fuel cells (abst...

MassDosage writes "Getting Started with Audacity 1.3 by Bethany Hiitola covers the basics of using the Audacity software package for recording and editing audio. This book is written in a tutorial sty...

MrSeb writes "A great collective gasp issued from tuned-in Firefox fans when Mozilla announced that it was switching to a Chrome-like release schedule for its browser. Now Mozilla wants to take things...

Slags writes "The idea behind Fluidinfo is that read-only information is just not as useful on the Web as openly writable information. Metadata is used routinely in the real world from name tags to po...

wintertargeter writes "Yeah, it's another article on security, but this time we finally get a complete picture. Tom's Hardware looks at WPA/WPA2 brute-force cracking with CPUs, GPUs, and Amazon's Nvid...

I typically travel with a laptop and camera, but usually with a bag for each: abackpack for the laptop and a lowepro top loader for the camera. I'd really prefer a singlebackpack for both a 17" macboo...

19061969 wrote in with a link about how the Pacific Island of Niue is issuing a set of commemorative Star Wars coins. While the $2 coins can be used as legal tender on the island, the government hopes...

coondoggie writes "Denizens of the malware underworld who sell access to compromised computers do so at varying rates depending on where the machines are located, researchers told the Usenix Security ...

MojoKid writes "The Federal Communications Commission has released the results of a year-long scientific study it conducted with regard to the upload and download speeds of thirteen American Internet ...

MrSeb writes "Intel's next consumer CPUs — the Sandy Bridge-E — will ship without a heatsink and fan. These new chips, which will feature up to 15MB of L3 cache and integrated four-channel...

zacharye writes "Google and Motorola Mobility have announced an agreement whereby Google will acquire Motorola for $12.5 billion. The acquisition price equates to $40 per share of Motorola stock, or a...

Hugh Pickens writes "Christian Torres writes that Facebook and the pharmaceutical industry have had an uneasy partnership in recent years and many drug companies didn't join the site until Facebook ga...

thebchuckster writes "The darkest alien world ever spotted by astronomers has been discovered in the outskirts of our galaxy. 'It's darker than the blackest lump of coal, than dark acrylic paint you m...

An anonymous reader writes "The Egyptian Military Prosecution has charged 26-year-old activist and blogger Asmaa Mahfouz for allegedly defaming the country's ruling generals and calling for armed oper...

angry tapir writes "The Chinese city of Kunming has stopped 22 fake Apple stores from illegally using the company's iconic trademarks after Apple lodged a complaint with authorities. Kunming authoriti...

sfcrazy writes "Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux kernel 3.1 rc2. He said '300+ commits for -rc2 is good, but please make me even happier for -rc3 by ONLY sending me real fixes. T...

An anonymous reader writes "The United Nations' most recent global climate report 'fails to capture trends in Arctic sea-ice thinning and drift, and in some cases substantially underestimates these tr...

astroengine writes "As the Perseid meteor shower begins to subside, there is one observer who was perfectly positioned to take a photograph where the skies are guaranteed to be clear from cloud. NASA ...

oxide7 writes "NASA is pushing the boundaries of technology as it readies its next mission to Mars, loading up its 4th Mars Rover with nearly a dozen instruments and deploying an innovative but risky ...

Nate the greatest submits news of a claim that a recently released ebook application from Hamstersoft is actually built from code lifted from calibre, the ebook library app. He writes "It turns out th...

Fudge Factor 3000 writes "Apple and Exxon are fighting it out to be the company with the largest market cap. Tuesday, Apple pulled ahead. It is hard to believe a tech company can beat out an oil giant...

BogenDorpher writes "Mozilla is currently on schedule to release Firefox 6 on August 16th but it looks like the final version has already been signed off and is unofficially available on Mozilla's ser...

derGoldstein writes "Intel will again offer CPU upgrades through software. In the past, the upgrades gave you HyperThreading and more L3 cache. This time upgrades will actually increase CPU frequency:...

mikejuk writes "Researchers have devised and tested a system called Theia that can perform an efficient parallel search of mobile phones to track down a target photo. It could be used to perform a rea...

Hugh Pickens writes "Brian Palmer writes that although none of the major manufacturers has released data on their energy consumption and how much greenhouse gas making a bicycle requires, Shreya Dave,...

theodp writes " Booting up was a bear,' recalls Slate's Farhad Manjoo, 'something to be avoided at all costs.' But now, he adds, 'It's time to rejoice, because all that's in the past. Computers these ...

Xiph1980 writes "Experian Hitwise claims Bing and Bing-powered search to be more effective than Google. The success rate for Bing searches in the U.S. in July was 80.04%, compared to 67.56% for Google...

According to the San Francisco Appeal, the cellphone service shut-down that the BART system imposed Thursday (by disabling transponders which allow cellphone communications in the underground portion ...

itwbennett writes "Even the most ardent enthusiasts gathered at the annual Space Elevator Conference on Friday don't expect it to be built anytime soon, but that doesn't stop them from dreaming, plann...

anonymousNR writes "A CERN physicist has a new theory explaining the rotational curves of galaxies. 'The key message of my paper is that dark matter may not exist and that phenomena attributed to dark...

derGoldstein writes "Project PyPy is an alternative implementation of Python, with the main advantage being a Just In Time (JIT) compiler which speeds up your code considerably. They've announced the ...

An anonymous reader writes "Apple has filed two patent applications that describe an approach as well as file formats and APIs to eliminate the printer driver as a requirement for users to access a pr...

Trailrunner7 writes "There are remotely and easily exploitable vulnerabilities in the BlackBerry Enterprise Server that could allow an attacker to gain access to the server by simply sending a malicio...

schwit1 writes "Recently a number of ISPs have been caught improperly redirecting end-user traffic in order to generate affiliate payments, using a system from Paxfire. A class action lawsuit has been...

coondoggie writes "In the wake of new fuel efficiency standards, the Energy Department this week spotted 40 new research projects $175 million to develop everything from light-weight building material...

itwbennett writes "Researchers at UC San Diego and Cornell University have developed software that they say can detect variations in flash behavior that are unique to each chip. The system uses 'physi...

The Lodsys saga continues; reader WyzrdX writes with this excerpt from Wired: "Google has intervened in an ongoing intellectual property dispute between smartphone application developers and a patent-...

An anonymous reader writes with a link to Hack A Day's step-by-step guide to installing Linux on a 386 laptop, which looks like a nice rainy-day project, as long as you are a stubborn hardware collect...

farrellj writes "A recent decision in the Ontario Appeals court has ruled in favour of Tucows, saying that domain names are considered property, rather than being a license. This has major ramificatio...

hypnosec writes "A new research has showed that Smartphones are worse in connectivity than 2G enabled mobile phones in remote areas in the United Kingdom. The research conducted by telecom watchdog Of...

tlhIngan writes "It looks like Motorola wants to join in on the Android patent licensing fun enjoyed by Microsoft and others. (Yes, the same Motorola that makes Android phones.) Motorola CEO Sanjay Jh...

An anonymous reader writes "The Netherlands is testing a new car use tax system that will tax drivers based upon how much they drive rather than just taxing the vehicle itself. The trials utilize a li...

quarterbuck writes "The Wall Street Journal has a review of the Telikin, an all-in-one desktop, with a touch screen, that starts at $699 and comes from a small Philadelphia-area start-up called Ventur...

oxide7 writes "August's Perseid meteor shower has historically been providing the best opportunity for enthusiasts to catch meteor shows, but this year the Internet will let casual observers enjoy the...

1729 writes "Yesterday, in an effort to disrupt rumored protests at Bay Area Rapid Transit stations, BART officials disabled cell phone and internet access within most of the BART system by shutting d...

thebchuckster writes "Scientists say they have found the first evidence that giant sea reptiles — which lived at the same time as dinosaurs — gave birth to live young rather than laying eg...

An anonymous reader writes "Last week Slashdot had the story that the web had turned 20 years old. Of course, patents also last 20 years, which has resulted in some asking what would have happened if ...

OverTheGeicoE writes "Wired has a story about TSA's known crewmember program, which allows airline pilots to bypass traditional airport security on their way to the cockpit. Pilots will be verified us...

Today Valve announced a new team-based shooter called Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. It's due out in early 2012, and will be available on Windows and OS X through Steam, as well as the PS3 and Xbox...

CWmike writes "Mozilla is on track to release Firefox 6 next week, according to notes posted on the company's website. 'On track with a few bugs still remaining. No concerns for Tuesday,' the notes st...

An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday a partially-redacted document briefly appeared on the FCC website, accidentally posted by a law firm working for AT&T on the $39 billion T-Mobile deal (somewh...

An anonymous reader writes "Law Technology News is reporting that FOSS for large law firms and corporate counsel is starting to gain traction. There's a project called FreeEed, for the electronic disc...

derGoldstein writes "This year Microsoft kept signaling that it's going back to lower-level code with a C++ renaissance. It would give C++ programmers the same priority that was, u...

theodp writes "Don't want to pay Apple $199 to repair the cracked screen of the $199 iPhone you dropped? Neither, apparently, does Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. A patent application made public Thursday ...

Vigile writes "John Carmack sat down for an interview during Quakecon 2011 to talk about the future of technology for gaming. He shared his thoughts on the GPU hardware race (hardware doesn't matter b...

Hugh Pickens writes "A recent study published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science found that adults have almost as much need for being popular on Facebook as teenagers do, and ...

snydeq writes "Apple has much to learn about securing an operating system, and it could learn how from Microsoft, Roger Grimes writes in the wake of further evidence that Macs are more vulnerable to a...

An anonymous reader writes "Thorium, an abundant and radioactive rare earth mineral, could be used in conjunction with a laser and mini turbines to easily produce enough electricity to power a vehicle...

sciencehabit writes "Researchers have developed ultrathin electronics that can be placed on the skin as easily as a temporary tattoo (abstract). The scientists hope the new devices will pave the way f...

bonch writes "The FTC is investigating claims that Google prevented Android smartphone vendors from using competing services (covered previously), whether Google preferentially places its own services...

illiteratehack was one of several readers to point out that today is the 30th anniversary of the introduction of IBM's first popular PC, writing,"V3 managed to dig up the original review of IBM's Pers...

Tissue engineer Hanna Wendt has released a study about using spider silk to create artificial skin. The study found that "spider silks display excellent mechanical features that even rival man-made, h...

wiredmikey writes "A recent survey which included responses from 800 engineers and developers that work on embedded devices revealed that 24% of respondents knew of security problems in their company'...

ProgramadorPerdido writes "I have been a developer for 25 years. I learned Basic, VB, C, FoxPro, Cobol, and Assembler, but the languages I used the most were Pascal and Delphi. I then concentrated on ...

nonprofiteer writes "Scotland Yard confirms that it's using facial recognition technology to identify rioters in London. 'A law enforcement official, who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of ...

swandives writes "LinkedIn will make changes to a 'social advertising' feature that has been criticized for using members' names and photographs in advertisements on its website. Amid mounting critici...

MrSeb writes "Almost the entirety of Mozilla's income — 97% of $104 million — arrives in the form of royalties from the Firefox search box, and the lion's share (86%, $85 million) of those...

An anonymous reader writes "Last year we learned that the miracle material graphene could be made from common table sugar, and now researchers at Rice University have taken the discovery one step furt...

Hugh Pickens writes "The Christian Science Monitor reports that a U.S. Energy Department advisory panel has endorsed fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, a promising technology that injects a mixture of...

baxpace writes with a link describing a way to test your own security systems for vulnerabilities using Kinect-interpreted natural gestures in tandem with the Metasploit Framework and the Blender game...

derGoldstein writes with this quote from the official Google blog:"Today we're adding games to Google+. ... We want to make playing games online just as fun, and just as meaningful, as playing in...

daria42 writes "Australia's highest court has agreed to hear the long-running BitTorrent case between one of the country's largest ISPs, iiNet, and a group of film and TV studios represented by a copy...

ATKeiper writes "People have talked for a while about the effects of GPS on our driving ability and our sense of direction; one researcher at McGill has even been developing an exercise regimen to com...

IndigoDarkwolf writes "The Beeb reports that biologists Sebastian Greiss and Jason Chin have genetically modified a multicellular organism (Caenorhabditis elegans, a tiny worm) to combine an amino aci...

An anonymous reader writes "I was curious about the whole profile reporting and ID validation process on Google+ so I decided to do a little experimental work to find out just what is involved. A...

mikejuk writes "While Google makes headlines with its driverless car and even manages to lobby Nevada to legalize driverless cars on the public road — China quietly pushes ahead on its own. A dr...

FullBandwidth writes "Seems like some intrepid Slashdotters are always getting scoops on the soon-to-be-released handhelds (phones, tablets). What's the best way to get technical information and relea...

vuo writes "Finnish researchers have shown that the human brain contains photoreceptors that react to intracranial illumination. Light is provided through the ear canal with bright-light headsets by V...

An anonymous reader writes "Scotland Yard vowed to track down and arrest protesters who posted 'really inflammatory, inaccurate' messages on Facebook, but it didn't stop at just two people. While two ...

crookedvulture writes "SATA-IO has devised a couple of new storage interfaces optimized for solid-state drives. To serve high-performance SSDs that are fast approaching the 6Gbps ceiling imposed by th...

hypnosec writes "A German technology researcher on Wednesday showed global mobile makers and technology firms how General Packet Radio Service can easily be tapped, intercepted, and decrypted with an ...

An anonymous reader writes "After quadrupling the number of government datacenters over his first three years, Obama's Administration is reversing course and closing the most recently opened datacente...

theodp writes "Will Google's battle against Microsoft and Apple over their use of 'bogus' patents result in greater scrutiny of its own IP holdings? Take Google's new patent on 'Electronic Shippin...

itwbennett writes "Yesterday's release of the Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader brought to mind the bad old days of the browser wars, but with a new twist: while the app works on any iOS device, it only work...

x_IamSpartacus_x writes "DARPA says contact with its experimental hypersonic glider was lost after launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base on the central California coast. The agency says in Twitter pos...

Zothecula writes "In an industry obsessed with polygon counts and frame rates, Nintendo's Wii console and DS handheld were the proverbial knives at a gunfight. They were grossly underpowered compared ...

fangmcgee writes "By now, with films like Iron Man, its sequel, and Avatar, Hollywood has made us thoroughly familiar with the idea of the robotic exoskeleton. Less well known, however, is that resear...

d2ncal wrote in to tell us about a new service that takes all the guess work out of a relationship by providing you with timely feedback, and charts to see how your affection is trending. TheIcebreak ...

bluefoxlucid writes "Apparently cancer has been cured, by injecting people with HIV. From the article, "As the white cells killed the cancer cells, the patients experienced the fevers and aches and pa...

disco_tracy writes "The leading social networks demand that members use their real names, and they're not afraid to evict violators. Many Facebook users have quietly complied, despite the problems tha...

Stoobalou writes "In a move worthy of China's communist regime, UK PM David Cameron wants to shut down social networks whenever civil unrest rears its head in Britain's towns and cities. Speaking in t...

An anonymous reader writes "At SIGGRAPH 2011, a team of researchers from MIT presented a clever method for measuring microscopic surface structure using a rubber sensor, a camera, and a set of lights....

jbrodkin writes "One of the original engineers of IBM's first PC says PCs are 'going the way of the vacuum tube, typewriter, vinyl records, CRT and incandescent light bulbs.' With the 30th anniversary...

Last week we discussed news that Diablo 3 will include a real-money auction house for items and require a permanent connection to the internet even for single-player games. Fan reaction has been loud ...

CWmike writes "Apple isn't just going after the Samsung Galaxy Tab in Europe, it's also attacking the Motorola Xoom. Apple's lawsuit, which was filed in Germany and led to Tuesday's injunction barring...

An editorial at PikiGeek takes the position that gaming's trend toward realism can be detrimental in many situations, with the quest for graphical precision supplanting creativity and uniqueness. Quot...

angry tapir writes "The Australian Academic and Research Network (AARNet) has announced a wide range of initiatives around network upgrades, collaboration, and mobility as part of a new five-year plan...

gzipped_tar writes "Fans at a recent right-wing extremist rock festival in Germany thought they were getting free T-shirts that reflected their nationalistic worldview. But after the garment's first w...

itwbennett writes "Stanford professor Jure Leskovec knows who your friends will be before you've even met them and has won a Microsoft fellowship for his analysis. 'Data shows that who will be our nex...

An anonymous reader writes "A Mexican terrorist organization sent an explosive device to an ITESM professor due to his research in nanotechnology. ITS or Individuals with Wild Tendencies in english, i...

ffejie writes "Fred Lawler, SVP of Global Field Services at Level 3 has an amusing look at some strange fiber cuts that he's seen in his days maintaining a large fiber network across the US. Whether i...

OverTheGeicoE writes "The Wall Street Journal has a story describing how the portable radios used by many federal law enforcement agents have major security flaws that allow for easy eavesdropping and...

hypnosec writes "A fake iPhone 5, inspired by the leaked images of the device, has been discovered to be on sale in China. The quality of the hiPhone 5 varies with the price, with the most premium ver...

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Rick Grehan provides an in-depth comparison of six Python Web frameworks, including CubicWeb, Django, Pyramid, Web.py, Web2py, and Zope 2. 'No matter what your needs or lean...

An anonymous reader writes "When Gizmodo ran photos of Apple's iPhone 4 months before Apple even officially acknowledged it existed, the blogosphere exploded with excitement. But when details leaked e...

UnknowingFool writes "Beginning August 28, 2011 Walmart will close its online downloadable music store. After eight years, Walmart will no longer offer music for download but will still sell physical ...

disco_tracy writes "Modern militaries depend on fuel. Nearly 80 percent of the supplies delivered to operations in Iraq and Afghanistan consist of fuel, and it's no surprise that those military convoy...

CWmike writes "The tech industry's answer to this week's stock market roller coaster was delivered on Tuesday by the mighty Apple Inc. Apple saw its stock price rise enough — gaining more than 5...

coondoggie writes "NASA this week picked seven commercial space companies to fly a manner of experiments on their suborbital aircraft. According to NASA the companies will split $10 million and get a ...

HardYakka writes "A team of researchers at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory have designed a drug that can identify cells that have been infected by any type of virus, then kill those cells to terminate the in...

MrSeb writes "Do you have a few old, dusty beige-box computers kicking around that you'd like to turn into money? Or perhaps you'd just like to get rid of them, but you lack the means to dispose o...

joaommp writes "Taiwanese scientists developed a new type of film that can be printed on a thermal printer and erased up to 260 times. The boffins at the Industrial Technology Research Institute claim...

An anonymous reader writes "An appeals court has ruled that having people send a company a lot of emails (in this case, a union protesting a company's business practices) qualifies as hacking under th...

cylonlover writes "At one time not all that long ago, cars had a warning light on the dashboard that simply said 'ENGINE.' That's pretty vague. Really, it might just as well have said 'CAR.' Some newe...

hypnosec writes "Research institute CERN has launched a new project to tap into the extra computing power from the public for its Large Hadron Collider atom smashing project. According to the organiza...

theodp writes "Google has decided to pull the plug on Android App Inventor, which was once touted as a game-changer for introductory computer science. In an odd post, Google encourages folks to 'Get S...

itwbennett writes "The old Linux arguments that pit one tool against another — Evolution vs. Thunderbird, LibreOffice vs. OpenOffice, and GNOME3 vs. Unity vs. KDE vs. everything else — may...

s31523 writes "When the residents of the Alaskan village of Kivalina woke up last week, the unexpected sight of an orange goo covering the surface of the water was quite alarming. Suspecting a oil spi...

mahiskali writes "New documents pertaining to the ever-hyped and much-delayed Motorola Droid Bionic have surfaced on the FCC website. Perusing through the documents, I noticed a very interesting featu...

An anonymous reader writes "At the DEFCON 19 hacking conference it seems that a full man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack was successfully launched against all 4G and CDMA transmissions in and around the v...

An anonymous reader writes "There's not another nation in the world that can wage kinetic warfare as effectively as the United States, and that's probably at the heart of the reason why the United Sta...

Blacklaw writes "The group behind the USB 3.0 specification has announced a tweak which could lead to impressive new devices, including large-format displays, printers, and even laptops that are power...

Hugh Pickens writes "Portland, Oregon will be the first city to use IBM's new software called Systems Dynamics for Smarter Cities, containing 3,000 equations which collectively seek to model cities' e...

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from the Opposable Thumbs blog:"It doesn't take much raw power to play Nintendo or SNES games on a modern PC; emulators could do it in the 1990s with a mere 25MH...

chefwear writes "I am thinking of donating retired computers to a local charity for kids. What OS do you think would be best for this? From reading tips regarding the donation of computers, it's w...

An anonymous reader writes "The annual Perseid meteor shower, which is caused by debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle and has been observed for about 2000 years, will be hampered this year by the full moon....

nonprofiteer writes "A bunch of vigilantes are organizing a Google Group dedicated to using recently revealed facial recognition tools to identify looters in the London riots. While Vancouver discusse...

An anonymous reader writes "Those giant touch screens used by CNN anchors look slick, but have to be several feet thick to make room for the cameras that track the touches. Perceptive Pixel, which mak...

CWmike writes "Microsoft on Tuesday issued 13 security updates that patched 22 vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, Windows, Office and other software, including one that harked back two decades to s...

Trepidity writes "Controversy continues over the seemingly unstoppable trend of 'gamification' (something we've discussed previously). The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business held ...

An anonymous reader writes "GameFly apparently wants to follow in the footsteps of Netflix, announcing plans to launch a new online client that allows users to download and install their rentals over ...

DarkOx sends this snippet from BusinessInsider:"Anonymous has vowed to destroy Facebook on November 5th (which should ring a bell). Citing privacy concerns and the difficulty involved in deleting a Fa...

schwit1 writes "Homeland Security plans to operate a massive new database of names, photos, birthdays and biometrics called Watchlist Service, duplicated from the FBI's Terrorist Screening Database, w...

Orome1 writes "Google Image Search has for some time been littered with images that lure users to compromised sites that serve as doorway pages to other malicious sites. Part of the problem is that th...

An anonymous reader writes "With a patent originally owned by LG in tow, a Florida based company called Operating Systems Solutions LLC recently filed suit against Apple claiming that OS X's use of qu...

wiedzmin writes with an article in Wired about DNA collection from criminals in California. From the article: "A California appeals court is striking down a voter-approved measure requiring every adul...

In an interview with AllthingsD, the head of Nokia's US operations declared that Nokia will be focusing exclusively on Windows Phone devices in North America. Reasons cited include the low profit marg...

Jeremy Allison - Sam wrote in to let us know the Samba project has made a major new release. The main highlight is support for SMB 2.0 which was released as part of Windows Vista. There are a number o...

Fnord666 writes with a CMU press release. From the article: "Traditional motion capture techniques use cameras to meticulously record the movements of actors inside studios, enabling those movements t...

astroengine writes "Early Tuesday morning, the Sun unleashed a powerful X-class flare. The X7 flare is the most energetic explosion to come from the Sun since December 2006. Although the flare was dir...

bizwriter writes with a news piece in bnet about the continuing battle between Samsung and Apple. From the article: "In a stunning and painful decision for Samsung, Apple got a German court to issue a...

Stoobalou writes with an interview in Thinq with a few folks from ARM on their plans for the future of embedded graphics. From the article:"'If you're looking at the visual experience that we can deli...

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla could be heading into an open confrontation with its rivals Google, Apple and Microsoft as browsers evolve into platforms. Mozilla's director of Firefox engineering...

coondoggie writes "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is taking to the sky again, this time to run what it say will be the second and final test of its hypersonic Falcon aircraft which is c...

An anonymous reader writes "For all the stories of patent trolls and copyright trolls, there haven't been too many stories of either being sanctioned for abusive or extortion-like practices... until n...

Hugh Pickens writes "The WSJ reports that following three nights of rioting and looting in London, Blackberry's messaging network and social networking sites are being blamed by police, politicians an...

MikeChino writes "King Abdullah of Jordan (who was once an extra in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager) has given the green light to a $1.5 billion Star Trek theme park that will boldly take Jordan wher...

sl4shd0rk writes "At a Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, researchers presented exploits on Apple's DHX authentication scheme which can compromise all connected Macs on the LAN within minutes...

MistrX writes "Researchers announced that the components of DNA have now been confirmed to exist in extraterrestrial meteorites. A different team of scientists also discovered a number of molecules li...

holy_calamity writes "Homomorphic computing makes it possible to compute with encrypted data and get an encrypted result, something that could make cloud services more secure. Such systems have so far...

Tufriast writes "The world's first mechanically augmented athlete, Oscar Pistorius, will now compete against unaugmented peers on behalf of South Africa. He'll be running in the 400m and 4x400m relay ...

An anonymous reader writes "Last week, as the result of a straw poll on Facebook, Village Instruments agreed to begin development of an external Thunderbolt-connected graphics card enclosure. Village ...

swandives writes "India's home ministry has asked its communications ministry to monitor social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook amid fears that the services are being used by terroris...

tekgoblin writes "Verizon, like AT&T has now started blocking jailbroken phones from using un-sanctioned tethering apps. Verizon will now require users to be subscribed to a mobile tethering plan ...

An anonymous reader writes "Michigan's Thomas M. Cooley Law School recently filed a lawsuit that appears to be boomeranging in the worst possible way. A little-noticed pseudonymous blogger respectfull...

An anonymous reader writes "Facebook has added a new type of story to its News Feed today: if more than one of your friends post about the same topic, and it has a Page on the social network, the post...

An anonymous reader writes "IBM has terminated its contract with NCSA for the petascale Blue Waters system that was expected to go online in the next year. The reason stated was that NCSA found IBM's ...

CWmike writes "Start-up Millenniata and LG plan to soon release a new optical disc and read/write player that will store movies, photos or any other data forever. The data can be accessed using any cu...

sciencehabit writes "Cygnus X-1 bears its name because it was the first source of x-rays found in the constellation Cygnus. In 1971, astronomers discovered that the x-rays came from the direction of a...

CWmike writes "After the hacking gang Anonymous took credit for defacing Syria's Ministry of Defense website, a Syrian group retaliated on Monday by posting gruesome photos on Anonymous' embryonic soc...

According to South Korean authorities, North Korean computer experts were tasked with raising money by attacking the servers of popular online games and using automated software to accumulate in-game ...

OverTheGeicoE writes "A graduate student was returning home from a science fair in Omaha with his handmade entry in his carry-on luggage. When the TSA discovered it, they shut down the airport termina...

jrepin tips news that the Khronos Group has announced the release of the OpenGL 4.2 specification. Some of the new functionality includes:"Enabling shaders with atomic counters and load/store/atomic r...

Harperdog writes with this excerpt from Miller-McCune:"I would not call myself a Luddite — I use digital resources all the time, in my research and my teaching. I have hundreds of PDFs of books ...

An anonymous reader writes "For a while now there has been a lot of buzz on a new proposed censorship scheme in Turkey. The government wants to crack down on freedom of speech and other rights by prev...

RossR writes "A Chinese multiplayer online game company is taking note of the success of 'private servers' running pirated and altered versions. In moves that show some common sense, when a pirate ser...

jfruhlinger writes "Protests against a police shooting in the poor London neighborhood of Tottenham escalated into rioting and looting this past weekend. Initial reports have it that the activity was ...

coondoggie writes "NASA's Mars rover Opportunity will likely peer over the rim of its ultimate destination this week, the huge Endeavour crater. According to a NASA post late last week, Opportunity wa...

siliconbits writes "AMD has quietly released a new range of memory products and recycled the Radeon brand, which moves from graphics processing units to memory modules. According to the product page, ...

adeelarshad82 writes "The patent system is certainly complex, especially when it comes to smartphones. The Financial Times estimates that as many as 250,000 patents are at stake in a smartphone. Indus...

theodp writes "Citing the widespread practice of sharing passwords for expediency's sake, Cisco's Chief Security Officer proclaimed in 2007 that people 'need to be held accountable for their risk-taki...

The original Planet of the Apes had a lot going for it: a compelling lead, an interesting story,a convincing world, a couple of good quotable catch phrases, and of course the not-really-all-that-surpr...

hypnosec noted that Google has stepped up to try to help fundraising for Bletchley Park. From TFA ‘The point is that all of us have heroes. At Google our heroes are Alan Turing and the people wh...

An anonymous reader writes "Texas is in the midst of a drought so severe that local water management teams have decided to distribute reclaimed wastewater (aka urine). The Colorado River Municipal Wat...

An anonymous reader writes "A hacktivism panel at the DefCon hacker convention conspicuously missing its star member Aaron Barr, who dropped out under legal pressure from his former company HBGary Fed...

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Neil McAllister questions whether slowing product development, legal woes, and rising bureaucracy will signal trying times ahead for Google. 'With Google's rapid growth have...

MojoKid writes "Earlier this year, Intel unveiled its plan to redefine the concept of a PC around an ultra thin-and-light chassis reminiscent of the Macbook Air and with a standard CPU TDP of just 15W...

Last friday Moody's S&P announced that they had downgraded the US's credit rating (leading to a pretty huge discussion on Slashdot I might add). Since then more interesting news has come out, sura...

Hugh Pickens writes "Three large explosions from the sun over the past few days have prompted U.S. government scientists to caution users of satellite, telecommunications and electric equipment to pre...

mask.of.sanity writes "An Aussie network engineer has published a guide to building a serial cable connector that allows access to a secret kernel debugger hidden within Apple iOS. The debugger was a ...

angry tapir writes "Meet the Firefly. Israeli defense contractor Rafael Armament Development Authority calls it a 'revolutionary concept in tactical intelligence,' but really it's a wireless camera th...

1sockchuck writes "A lightning strike has caused power outages at the major cloud computing data hubs for Amazon and Microsoft in Dublin, Ireland. The incident has caused downtime for many sites using...

An anonymous reader writes "You can now use the PS3 Sixaxis Controller on Android phones and devices. This requires your phone to be rooted, however it is incompatible with most HTC devices and some n...

Dangerous_Minds writes "One of the things that the PROTECT-IP act is said to do is make DNS servers censor websites that have been accused of copyright infringement. Drew Wilson of ZeroPaid decided to...

An anonymous reader writes "In addition to bringing up the plans for KDE on Wayland, Aaron Siego just announced at the 2011 Desktop Summit that the KDE 5.0 Frameworks libraries are being planned for d...

An anonymous reader writes "Facebook says it has found the proof that shows Paul Ceglia, a man that claims he owns half of the company over a 2003 contract, is a fraud. Facebook says it has found the ...

Science_afficionado writes "Electrical engineers at Vanderbilt have created the basic components for computer chips out of thin films of nanodiamond. These combine the properties of vacuum tubes and s...

Trouble with your landline? If you have Verizon, especially on the east coast, it might not be the best time to have it fixed; The Daily Mail reports that "Forty-five thousand Verizon workers from...

hydrofix writes "A thin band of antiprotons enveloping the Earth has been spotted for the first time. The find, described in Astrophysical Journal Letters [arXiv] (Note: abstract free, full text paywa...

An anonymous reader writes "Robot essay graders could be the answer to grade inflation. New software being tested turns over the task of grading to computers — this article has an interactive de...

linkedlinked writes "I'm tired of building my sandcastles on Google's beachfront. I've moved off Docs, Plus, and Analytics, so now it's time to host my own email servers. What are the best self-host o...

oxide7 writes with this selection from IBT: "Hewlett Packard reduced the price of its TouchPad tablet computer again, highlighting the uphill battle manufacturers will need to overcome as they go head...

An anonymous reader writes "During the 2011 Desktop Summit plans were brought up by a KDE developer to support KDE on the Wayland Display Server, which is dubbed the successor to X11. The KDE Wayland ...

Hugh Pickens writes "Fahmida Y. Rashid reports that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will fund new cyber-security proposals under the new Cyber-Fast Track project intended to cut red tape...

MojoKid writes "Comcast is launching 'Internet Essentials,' a new initiative offering discounted Internet access and home computers to families that meet low income requirements. The program was manda...

Ransak writes "It looks as if SETI has met its short term funding goal to restart the Allen Telescope Array. Is crowdsourcing the long term future of pure research projects?" Read more of ...

repvik writes "The 1500 page manifest of terrorist that killed 77 people in Oslo and on Utøya two weeks ago, contains a series of seemingly encrypted URLs. There are 46 of them, and the initial p...

John3 writes "American artist Chris Burden is finishing up his latest work titled Metropolis II for display this fall in Los Angeles. There's a fascinating five minute documentary on YouTube about his...

An anonymous reader writes "Wendy Seltzer, Fellow at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy, talks about the new plan by ISPs and content providers to 'crack down on what user...

mikejuk writes "Programmers have had to put up with Microsoft dithering over Office development for a long while. The macro language VBA has been on its way out ever since .NET was introduced and yet ...

jamesl writes with an excerpt from Defense Tech, which says the U.S. Army is sending "four [of] Lockheed's Squad Mission Support System (SMSS) robot jeeps to Afghanistan where they'll haul supplies fo...

darthcamaro writes "Remember the days of the viruses embedded in email attachments? They're coming back, according to a pair of researcher talking at Black Hat this week: '"If you have installed a...

An anonymous reader writes "Right now, in an email list excluded from the public eye, some bright people are discussing the future of SSL. Under debate is (a) do they allow DV (domain only validation)...

girlmad writes "On 6 August 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, then a humble scientist at CERN, made the first page on the World Wide Web publicly available in a move that, unbeknown to him at the time, would...

Not that it's the first city to enforce a youth curfew, and not that kids on a crime-spree is the only variety of moral panic offered as a rationale, but Philadelphia is cracking down through increase...

The BBC reports that Boeing has a source of human passengers to populate its manned crew transport vehicle, the CST-100: Boeing employees. The CST-100 is Boeing's bid to replace more expensive options...

An anonymous reader writes "I contacted the Director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Eben Upton, and he graciously gave an interview pertaining to his foundation, the Raspberry Pi device, and how the ...

msmoriarty writes "Three weeks after IT shops began complaining loudly that the licensing changes with vSphere 5 would cost them significantly more, VMware has revised the requirements (although not a...

hackingbear writes "In an interview with Chinese official Xinhua news agency, McAfee said no direct evidence suggests a particular nation such as China is behind Operation Shady RAT, a five-year cyber...

Hugh Pickens writes "I enjoy mowing my six-acre lawn with my John Deere 757 zero-turn every week, and over the course of the last five years of mowing I have come up with my own most efficient method ...

OverTheGeicoE writes "The German government just finished a 10-month test of millimeter-wave body scanners made by L3 Communications. It appears they are not happy with the results. The devices raise ...

oxide7 writes with this excerpt from the International Business Times: "The United States lost its top-notch AAA credit rating from Standard & Poor's on Friday in an unprecedented reversal of fort...

ptorrone writes "MAKE magazine has published an in-depth look at what the recent acquisition of Instructables by Autodesk means for makers and the DIY movement. MAKE suggests it wasn't about getting t...

Sparrowvsrevolution writes "At the Defcon security conference in Las Vegas, Marc Weber Tobias and Toby Bluzmanis plan to demonstrate simple hardware hacks that expose critical security problems in Swi...

twocows writes "FOX is set to make a new season of Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos: A Personal Voyage,' hosted by Neil Degrasse Tyson and written by none other than Ann Druyam (Carl Sagan's widow). Let's hope th...

bbowman writes "One of my job responsibilities is to set up the small network for our company's exhibit at the trade shows we attend. The mobile demo devices we use depend upon a reliable Wi-Fi connec...

splitenz writes "Expanding the field of complex event process software with another offering, Twitter will release as open source its software for analysing live large-scale data streams, called Storm...

datapharmer writes "We've all read previous stories on slashdot about Google's driverless car, and some have even pondered if a crash would bring the end to robotic cars. For better or for worse, we w...

jfruhlinger writes "Today's programmers have much more advanced languages and more forgiving hardware to play with — but it seems many have forgotten some of the lessons their predecessors picke...

dotarray writes with news that Notch, creator of Minecraft, has received a letter from Zenimax, parent company of Bethesda, demanding that he rename his company's new game, which is called Scrolls. Th...

Harperdog writes with this excerpt from a story at Miller-McCune:"Yes, it's true that the fuel-economy standards the U.S. has been using cost lives. Economist Mark Jacobson has estimated that for ever...

JStyle writes "The DOE has officially announced a winner of the L Prize, giving the award to Philips in the 60 W Incandescent Bulb replacement category. The goal of the L Prize competition is to 'deve...

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla chairperson Mitchell Baker has been saying the company may be changing and thinking beyond Firefox in the future. Her ideas have become clearer: she is formulating ...

derGoldstein writes "Discovery is pointing to an ongoing study by Sophia Vinogradov, professor of psychiatry at UC-San Francisco, who is 'trying to determine whether computer-based cognitive remediati...

Since last year we've been following the story of how domains are being seized by the US government for allegedly facilitating online piracy. The seizures received a legal challenge back in June from ...

As a kid I had a minor obsession with invisible ink after learning about it in a science club. An impressive stack of vinegar and lemon scented papers filled my desk, but the history of invisible ink ...

hypnosec writes "Hackers' favorite recent target, Sony, has won an award at the Black Hat conference held in Las Vegas this week. However, much to the embarrassment of the company, the award it nailed...

telekon writes "Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd argues in this article that 'The people who most heavily rely on pseudonyms in online spaces are those who are most marginalized by systems of power.' T...

Michael J. Ross writes "With the proliferation of handheld devices that allow access to the Web, more business owners and other technology decision-makers are demanding that their organizations' websi...

sciencehabit writes "A small number of people in the world don't have fingerprints. The condition is known as adermatoglyphia, and one scientist has dubbed it the 'immigration delay disease' because s...

coondoggie writes "NASA shot its 4-ton Juno spacecraft into the cosmos today with the ultimate goal of learning everything we can about the largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter. Juno, once desc...

derGoldstein writes"According to an AP report, 'Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said the nonprofit company that runs the site is scrambling to simplify editing procedures in an attempt to retain volunte...

suy writes "Several open source projects exist under a variety of licenses, and we qualify them as free/open source depending on the license under which the final product is released. But there are ot...

Several readers have sent in news of a presentation at the Black Hat security conference from a diabetic security researcher, Jerome Radcliffe, who is looking into the security of automated insulin pu...

jfruhlinger writes "McAfee yesterday outlined what it calls Operation Shady RAT, a five-year campaign of cyberespionage launched by a national government against international organizations and privat...

GeneralSecretary writes "Google is developing an API to allow web apps to easily share information with various services. Quoting: 'Android OS addresses this problem with Intents, a facility for late ...

Hugh Pickens writes "Big cable companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable keep saying they don't see Web video cutting into their business, but there's at least one big, dirty exception. Time Warner...

Peter Eckersley writes "The Netalyzr research project from the ICSI networking group has discovered that on a number of US ISPs' networks, search traffic for Bing, Yahoo! and sometimes Google is being...

itwbennett writes "Notorious spam king Sanford Wallace is facing federal fraud charges for allegedly breaking into the Facebook accounts of 500,000 victims in 2008 and 2009 and using the stolen creden...

Bethesda plans to launch their newest Elder Scrolls game, Skyrim, in November, and they've finally started to take the wraps off the game. A preview at Eurogamer provides some information about the ga...

twoheadedboy writes "Another day, yet another data security failure. Two companies have been found in breach of the Data Protection Act after tens of thousands of tenants' details were left at a Londo...

decora writes "On several recent Wednesdays, Russian language social networking site Vkontakte has been blocked by the government of Belarus. The blocks are partly to prevent the organization of 'Sile...

GusGous writes "South African newspaper Beeld reports that the first person known to be arrested for jailbreaking the Playstation 3 was arrested in Parktown, Johannesburg today. This raid was conducte...

sfcrazy writes "Google has updated its stable channel for Chromebooks (Acer AC700, Samsung Series 5, and Cr-48). The latest version of Google chrome running on these devices is Chrome 13. The feature ...

itwbennett writes "Macs aren't being hit with advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks, but that doesn't mean they're invulnerable, say researchers at iSec Partners. Speaking at the Black Hat conferen...

SeattleGameboy writes "It seems that the Renton (suburb of Seattle) police need a remedial course on the U.S. Constitution," linking to a story at Seattle TV station KIRO which says "The Renton City P...

rcade writes "Jeff Dee and Jack Herman, the creators of the super-hero roleplaying game Villains & Vigilantes, have filed a federal copyright lawsuit against the game's longtime publisher Scott Bi...

An anonymous reader writes "John Carmack just confirmed during his QuakeCon 2011 keynote that the source code to Doom 3 will be released this year. The source drop will follow the release of their Rag...

bonch writes "Google's accusation of patent abuse toward its competitors has generated many responses, some of which has asked whether Android's free price is anti-competitive. Drawing comparisons to ...

An anonymous reader writes "Scientists have developed a porous chip that can identify liquids instantaneously. Each liquid's distinct surface tension determines how much it seeps into the pores of the...

TeaCurran writes with this mildly ranty objection to the most recent Mac OS X update; several friends who have made the leap on their MacBook Pros have various other complaints, too, including system ...

holy_calamity writes "Inventor of the Quicktime codec Steve Perlman has unveiled a new wireless technology he claims can deliver thousands of times more bandwidth to mobile devices than existing techn...

Rymix writes "I have been working with a new internet-friend of mine to produce an open source gesture recording and recognition engine for Kinect SDK. It's based on the Dynamic Time Warping technique...

msmoriarty writes "The second-ever federal CIO (the first, Vivek Kundra, resigned in June) will be Steven VanRoekel, who worked with Microsoft for 15 years, running the company's Web Services and Plat...

mikejuk writes "After striking out on their own the former Mono team, now reconstituted as Xamarin, has just issued its first release of Mono. This is essentially a minor release with lots of bug fixe...

Today's promised mystery announcement from NASA has finally been made: dotancohen writes "A NASA orbiter has found possible evidence for water on the surface of Mars that flows seasonally. The water l...

s31523 writes "With China having 97% of the market share of rare earth elements, many countries are nervous about being able to get supplies of key elements needed for high tech gear. Quantum Rare Ear...

kkleiner writes "1,000 meters, or 3,280 feet. That's two-thirds of a mile. When the Kingdom Tower is built on the outskirts of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia it will not only become the tallest building in the ...

rmstar writes "In an article titled 'The Spoilsmen: How Congress Corrupted Patent Reform,' Huffington Post reporter Zach Carter takes a look at the story behind the recent patent reform effort. It is ...

bLanark writes "NASA have teamed up with Lego and will send three specially crafted, minifigures towards Jupiter in a probe to be launched on an Atlas V rocket on Friday. The figures, representing Rom...

An anonymous reader writes "IEEE Spectrum reports that Stanford's CS221 course 'Introduction to Artificial Intelligence' will be offered online for free. Anyone can sign up and take the course, along ...

MrSeb writes "Smart power grid monitoring that lets you pick the exact cheapest time to run the dishwasher or recharge your electric car may put too much power (so to speak) in the hands of the consum...

chicksdaddy writes with a post in Threat Post. From the article: "Dillon Beresford used a presentation at the Black Hat Briefings on Wednesday to detail more software vulnerabilities affecting industr...

snydeq writes "Neil McAllister sees Oracle's buggy Java SE 7 release as only the latest misstep in a mounting litany of bad behavior. 'Who was the first to alert the Java community? The Apache Fou...

ipsender writes with a NASA announcement:"NASA will host a news briefing on Thursday, Aug. 4, at 11 a.m. PDT (2 p.m. EDT) about a significant new Mars science finding. The briefing will be held at NAS...

pbahra writes with an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. From the article: "A few weeks ago Microsoft's European chairman told TechEurope that the average amount of venture capital per head across ...

johanneswilm writes "Over more than 3 years I have been writing my PhD thesis on the politics of Nicaragua. Being the most professional system for PDF generation, I went with LaTeX, and, to make the t...

Hugh Pickens writes "Bloomberg reports that Google has accused Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle of waging a 'hostile, organized campaign' against Android by purchasing patents to keep them out of Google's...

Sparrowvsrevolution writes "At the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas Wednesday, researcher Dan Kaminsky announced he will release a free software tool for detecting when an Internet service p...

An anonymous reader writes "A new study (abstract) published at the annual ACM Foundations of Digital Games conference by researchers from Copenhagen Business School and the University of Waterloo exp...

DMandPenfold writes "The Department of Health is concerned that Fujitsu, CSC and BT would team up against it in a multibillion pound legal fight, should it decide to scrap the disastrous NHS National ...

fangmcgee writes "London could soon be covered with a free public WiFi network as Virgin Media moves to challenge BT's Openzone network. Virgin Media's network would be freely available to anyone at 0...

dotarray writes "Even though an adult rating for video games has been approved in theory for Australia, it's still a little ways off – and will not come soon enough for Red Orchestra 2: Heroes o...

fysdt writes "Although we think it's generally a pretty nifty feature, valid concerns over the misuse of Facebook's auto-recognition tagging have lead Germany to ban it entirely. That's right—Fa...

kai_hiwatari writes "In Google+, Torvalds criticized the direction that GNOME has taken with GNOME 3. He called GNOME 3 an 'unholy mess' and said that the user experience is unacceptable. Adding ...

nonprofiteer writes "The News Corp iPad newspaper has a drone they've been using for news gathering — mainly flying it over disaster zones in N. Dakota and Alabama. However, FAA regulations on d...

Zothecula writes "Researchers at the Ningpo, China campus of the University of Nottingham (UNNC) have created a new heat-regulating material that could be used to cut the heating and cooling costs of ...

alphadogg writes "Given the seemingly non-stop battle between Google, Microsoft and others in Web search, you might think this is a pretty fertile area for new ideas. But a University of Washington co...

thebchuckster writes "The African crested rat has been known to kill local dogs, but researchers have just figured out how. After eating the 'poison-arrow plant,' the over-sized rodent stores its pois...

gumbi west writes "One Wall Street analyst predicts what slashdot commenters have predicted for years, that iOS and OS X will merge into a single OS. However the analyst sees this happening because th...

An anonymous reader writes "The theory that our universe is contained inside a bubble, and that multiple alternative universes exist inside their own bubbles – making up the 'multiverse' –...

jfruhlinger writes "Like most people in America — and like most government workers in particular — federal IT staffers are wondering how the recent budget deal will affect them. It seems t...

kkleiner writes "People Power 1.0 is an open and extensible cloud-based platform that allows you to monitor up-to-the-minute household energy usage from an iPhone or Android smartphone. Part of the gr...

mikejuk writes "The recent unsettling behavior at Microsoft concerning .NET makes it a good time to re-evaluate what the technology is all about. It may have been good technology but with the systems ...

Today, after Eurogamer spilled the beans earlier than Randy Pitchford would have liked, Gearbox and 2K Games officially announced Borderlands 2, the sequel to 2009's well-received shooter/RPG. It's pl...

coondoggie writes "As cars and other forms of transportation increasingly rely on online systems for everything from safety to onboard entertainment, the cybersecurity threat from those who would expl...

AaronW writes "According to a story at space.com, Earth may once have had two moons. The smaller moon, estimated to be 750 miles (1200km) wide and only 4% of the mass of the larger moon, crashed into ...

jbarr writes "In the latest Marvel Comic series 'Ultimate Fallout,' Miles Morales replaces Peter Parker who has been killed off by the Green Goblin. Morales is a half-black, half-Latino teen, and the ...

AaronW writes "According to a story at space.com, Earth may once have had two moons. The smaller moon, estimated to be 750 miles (1200km) wide and only 4% of the mass of the larger moon, crashed into ...

Trailrunner7 writes "In the face of mounting external pressure to begin paying bug bounties, Microsoft is instead launching a new program that will pay a $200,000 top prize to a security researcher wh...

asto21 writes "Almost no one does just one thing anymore. The screens won't let us. And in an incredible burst of human evolution, our minds have grown accustomed to monitoring multiple inputs at once...

siliconbits writes "One of the architects of US foreign policy under George W. Bush, General Michael Hayden, suggested that the US Government should consider creating a "Digital Blackwater" during a c...

Trailrunner7 writes "Researchers from IBM's ISS X-Force plan to unveil a new system for running an open wireless network in a secure mode at the Black Hat conference here this week. The system mimics ...

JohnBert writes "Google patched 30 vulnerabilities in Chrome, paying out the third-highest bounty total ever for the bugs that outsiders filed with its security team. The company packaged the patches ...

hypnosec writes "Google Inc.'s new social networking platform Google+ is one of the first to boast of more than 25 million users in less than one month of the launch. Market research firm comScor...

A steady stream of people have submitted notes this morning saying that the story that we (and the entire internet, and even NPRs Marketplace) mentioned recently talking about browser platform correla...

fysdt writes "IT security firm McAfee claims to have uncovered one of the largest ever series of cyber attacks. It lists 72 different organisations that were targeted over five years, including the In...

sfcrazy also noticed that Apple has officiallyremoved MySQL from Lion Server, opting instead to include PostgreSQL, albeit in command line only form. The article speculates that the change is because ...

Chaonici writes "The EFF has a blog post about what appears to be Facebook's stance on anonymity on the Internet. Speaking last week at a social media conference hosted by Marie Claire magazine, Faceb...

id Software's upcoming shooter Rage is nearing its Oct. 4 release, and the company recently provided some hands-on time with the game in its current state. GiantBomb described it thus: "In those three...

nk497 writes "The UK is finally set to legalize format shifting, making it legal for the first time to rip songs or films from CDs and DVDs. Ripping is technically illegal under copyright protection l...

Lucas123 writes "eBay's QA division was facing mounting performance issues related to its exponential growth of virtual servers, so instead of purchasing more 15k rpm Fibre Channel drives, the company...

An anonymous reader writes "Exploiting Florida's liberal public-records laws and Google's search algorithms, a handful of entrepreneurs are making real money by publicly shaming people who've run afou...

An anonymous reader writes "Poul-Henning Kamp looks back at some of the bad decisions made in language design, specifically the C/Unix/Posix use of NUL-terminated text strings. 'The choice was really ...

GhostX9 writes "Charlie Miller, Accuvant Principal Research Consultant and keynote speaker at NATO's recent International Conference on Cyber Conflict, speaks with Alan Dang of Tom's Hardware about li...

mikejuk writes ".NET Gadgeteer is a new open source platform, from Microsoft Research, based on the use of the .NET Micro Framework. It brings with it lots of hardware modules that are backed by objec...

snoop.daub writes "Dr. Tom Murphy, professor of astrophysics at UCSD, has a new blog called 'Do The Math,' and the first few posts are doozies. In the first, he shows the impossibility of continued ex...

snydeq writes "Nathan Clevenger examines the impact that the 'consumerization' of information technology will have on IT organizations, a trend fueled in large part by employee interest in the latest ...

suraj.sun sends an excerpt from this post made by a developer who decided to try out Amazon's App Store, only to be disappointed with the experience:"Amazon's biggest feature by far, has been their Fr...

coondoggie writes with an article in Networkworld about a disconcerting DARPA project. From the article: "If a picture is worth a thousand words, the scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projec...

jfruhlinger writes "It may seem strange that the US government would be recruiting tech talent at Black Hat, a security conference whose participants have a notorious ambivalence about keeping within ...

twocentplain writes in with an MIT news release about Jolt, a research project designed to unfreeze software stuck in an infinite loop (for a subset of infinite loops). It uses a combination of static...

An anonymous reader writes in with an opinion piece in the Economistabout the the effectsof patent trolling on the US economy. The author argues that theUS patent regime is causing the US essentially ...

AlienIntelligence writes "Looks like the loophole that Zediva founded their business model on evaporated. Zediva's biggest problem was getting over a 1991 ruling against a similar method of transmitti...

iONiUM writes "Scientists have found a strange object in the seabed between Sweden and Finland. While claims are flying around that its a UFO that strangely resembles the Millennium Falcon, it is prob...

AzTechGuy writes "Early this year I received one of the 'Whitebox' routers to test the speed of my ISP and compare it to the advertised speed. Today I received an email that they have released the fir...

Dog's_Breakfast writes "In a declining economy, software licenses become a luxury. Linux and the BSDs offer free alternatives. As the USA toys with the possibility of defaulting on its national debt (...

An anonymous reader writes "With its recent mass suspension of accounts, Google has highlighted its desire to create a social network that is very different to the way many (including those whose acco...

Slashdot regular contributor Bennett Haselton wrote in this week to say that "The proposed "Telex" anti-censorship system could technically work, but unless I'm missing something, it would more cost-e...

An anonymous reader writes "Teachers can be friendly with their students, but they can't be their friends, at least when it comes to social networks such as Facebook. State Governor Jay Nixon has sign...

suraj.sun writes "Microsoft has ceased publishing the estimated locations of millions of laptops, cell phones, and other devices with Wi-Fi connections around the world after a CNET article on Friday ...

itwbennett writes "Nissan has developed a system that allows a vehicle to supply electricity to power a house during a power outage or shortage. A prototype of the charging system running on a Nissan ...

Mark.JUK writes "German scientists working at Berlin's Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications have set a new world record for Visible Light Communication (VLC) technology after they succeeded in ...

An anonymous reader writes "A 31 year old Swedish male was arrested for trying to build a nuclear reactor in his apartment. He got hold of radioactive material thru mail-order purchases and from smoke...

Hugh Pickens writes "Cyrus Sanati writes in Fortune Magazine that up until now, it has been widely accepted that being bigger was better for oil companies, but the announcement that ConocoPhillips pla...

itwbennett writes "When last we left the Oracle/Google patent infringement saga, Oracle had been ordered by Judge William Alsup to lower its claim for damages to $100 million, give or take. Today Judg...

An anonymous reader writes "An article at Ars goes through some of the biggest sins game publishers commit when porting a console game to the PC. At the top of the list, predictably, are annoying DRM ...

arglebargle_xiv writes "The Internet was designed around the end-to-end principle, which says that functionality should be provided by end hosts rather than in the network itself. A new study of the e...

trawg writes "A small Australian software company — backed by almost AUD$2 million in government assistance — is claiming they've developed a new technology which is '100,000 times better'...

lukehopewell1 writes "Apple has obtained an injunction from an Australian court effectively blocking the sale of the new Android Honeycomb-powered Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1v. Apple Australia claims that...

holy_calamity writes "For several years the U.S. Air Force has used WiFi-router-sized boxes on a New Mexico missile range to create a GPS-like service to track munitions to the nearest inch. Now the A...

An anonymous reader writes "At the end of July 2011, Microsoft can say that Windows XP finally fell below the 50 percent mark. In other words, Redmond's decade-old operating system is now used by less...

cheros writes "A BBC article reports on work at the Berlin Institute of technology where brainwaves are used to trigger brakes. Apparently this cuts braking distance by more than 3m (10ft), but I have...

kruhft writes "I was recently doing some research into Genetic Programming and found a library through a blog post that looks to be useful. After looking over the code and license, I found that this w...

jbrodkin writes "A new Android Trojan is capable of recording phone conversations, according to a CA security researcher. While a previous Trojan found by CA logged the details of incoming and outgoin...

Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that Judge Richard D. Bennett harshly criticized US prosecutor William M. Welch III for his treatment of a former spy agency official Thomas Drake, who...

pbahra writes "It is a reflection of the huge interest in HTML5 as a possible alternative to Flash that Adobe's launch of a very early preview of a toolkit for professional web developers immediately ...

JSBiff writes "With the incident at Fukushima causing much renewed concern about the risks of nuclear power this year, the NY Times brings news that the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has released...

Elliot Chang tips a story about plans from NASA and the US Air Force to clean up the areas around the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, which have been contaminated with decad...

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has been constructing a new user interface for Firefox, and the layout seems to be revealed in new mockups that show the integrated Home Tab app and the streamlinin...

wiredog sends in a story about how knowledge of lottery rules and statistics has allowed opportunistic players in Massachusetts to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on tickets while being assured...

lee1 writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation is trying to urge a federal court (PDF) to block what they claim is the unconstitutional use of the federal anti-stalking law to prosecute a man for pos...

An anonymous reader writes "'Tea. Earl Grey. Hot,' is a command familiar to every Trek fan as representing everyday use of replicator technology. While its use on the show is simply sci-fi wizardry, t...

tekgoblin writes "IEEE has just announced a new Wireless standard, 802.22, that can cover up to 12,000 square miles. The standard is actually for Wireless Regional Area Networks (or WRAN) which uses t...

The name pretty much sums it up: There are cowboys. There are aliens. And Iron ManDirector Jon Favreau has blown a pretty penny trying to make the whole thing work, gettingthe sexiest woman alive from...

If physicist Amelia Sparavigna is correct, in addition to frogs, lice, and locusts, Egyptian schoolchildren were also plagued with useless geometry instruments in their new notebooks at the beginning ...

nonprofiteer writes "Building on previous work showing that social security numbers are not random, CMU researchers ran experiments in which they predicted students' social security numbers after taki...

1sockchuck writes "How many servers is Google using? The company won't say, but a new report places the number at about 900,000. The estimate is based on data Google shared with researcher Jonatha...

trawg writes "At a special event at Blizzard HQ in California, gaming press were treated to the first look at the Diablo 3 auction house — featuring real-world money transactions across differen...

mutetab writes "I recently wrote a Chrome extension called MuteTab that helps you narrow down which tab is making a sound by detecting which tabs contain plugins, HTML5 audio/video, and Java applets. ...

I was excited to have a chance to go to the Detroit Maker Faire this year. I've always wanted toattend such a thing, but the stars never aligned. I saw an entire tent filled with DIY 3D Printersmaking...

Global markets are on the rise in response to a deal between President Obama and congressional Republicans on the debt. The deal would cut more than $2 trillion from federal spending over a decade. Ho...

An anonymous reader writes "I recently found out that the company I used to work for is removing all the open source licenses (GPL and MIT) from my work, distributing it as proprietary software and ta...

cultiv8 writes "When Miguel Hanson and his fiancee, Diana Wesley, got married on Saturday, a computer program Hanson wrote served as the minister. During the wedding, held in the Houston home of Hanso...

An anonymous reader writes "Scotland Yard has tonight charged 18-year-old Jake Davis, who was arrested in the Shetland Islands last week, with five offenses including unauthorized computer access and ...

judgecorp writes "Everlasting green energy for RF tags and other low-power devices could be possible as scientists have harvested energy from ambient radio waves using cheap antennas printed by an ord...

Hugh Pickens writes "Brian Wingfield writes in Bloomberg that the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future has sent a draft report to Energy Secretary Steven Chu recommending that US communi...

DeviceGuru writes "DeviceGuru's 10-inch tablet smackdown pits Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 against Apple's iPad 2. At price parity the iPad 2 is probably a better bet for the average user since it's a mo...

dkd903 writes "Roberta Nilerud of Canonical has announced that their cloud storage service – Ubuntu One – has hit the one million users mark. Ubuntu One is a cloud storage service from Can...

rennerik writes "A recent study of 100,000 people taking IQ tests compared the scores with which browser the person uses on a regular basis. On average, Internet Explorer users fared the worst, with I...

CWmike writes "Machines running the decade-old Windows XP make up a huge reservoir of infected PCs that can spread malware to other systems, a Czech antivirus company said. Windows XP computers are in...

tekgoblin writes "PayPal was attacked by Anonymous last year when they had blocked the Wikileaks accounts transactions. Now PayPal has finally come up with enough evidence to strike back at Anonymous ...

Hugh Pickens writes "Some of the same vulnerabilities that the Stuxnet superworm used to sabotage centrifuges at a nuclear plant in Iran exist in the country's top high-security prisons where programm...

theodp writes "Just days after it was reported that apartment sharing startup Airbnb had raised $112MM at a $1B+ valuation from investors that included Marc Andreessen and Jeff Bezos, Airbnb user...

hackingbear writes "Taiwanese technology giant Foxconn will replace some of its workers with 1 million robots in three years to cut rising labor expenses and improve efficiency. Foxconn, the world's l...

msmoriarty writes "Given the level of interest in the recent highest-paid programmers discussion, our reporter decided to do a follow-up looking into the languages and skills needed to work on high-fr...

gavron writes "The US Department of Justice will review the Nortel patent sale to the entity formed by Apple, Microsoft, and others. This is the same sale that the Canadian authorities declined to rev...