Articles by Slashdot from November 2011

itwbennett writes "Eurogamer published a piece on a rumored Kinect 2 system that will most likely launch with the next iteration of the Xbox line, which might be sometime between late 2012 and 2014. E...

MrKevvy writes"An Ottawa physicist is using laser light to create truly random numbers much faster than other methods do, with obvious potential benefits to cryptography: 'Sussman's Ottawa lab uses a ...

Animats writes"Facebook has agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it deceived consumers by telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private, and then repeatedly allo...

Aryden sends this quote from an IDG News report:"Research In Motion is taking on mobile device management for Android and Apple iOS devices as well as its own products, introducing the BlackBerry Mobi...

Asmodae writes "Stanislaw Burzynski runs a clinic specializing in an alternative cancer treatment called 'antineoplaston therapy,' and charges thousands of dollars for the privilege. Unfortunately, th...

JoeMerchant writes "Max Marty, founder of Blueseed, thinks immigration laws in the U.S. make it too difficult for entrepreneurs from other countries to come to the U.S. and develop new technologies. I...

New submitter rcoxdav writes "Researchers have found that the upgradeable firmware on some laser printers can be easily updated and compromised. The updated firmware could then be used to do anything ...

jfruhlinger writes "Telecommuting provides many joys, including the ability to stay in your pajamas all day and the chance to work with a cat on your lap. But it does have some major drawbacks, perhap...

bhagwad writes "The EU continues to ooze common sense as a court insists that software functions themselves cannot be copyrighted. Drawing a box or moving cursor are examples. To quote: 'If it were ac...

An anonymous reader writes "I am required to back up and wipe several hundred computers. Currently, this involves booting up each machine, running a backup script, turning the machine off, booting off...

itwbennett writes "In follow-up to yesterday's story about how Merck in Germany is threatening legal action to take its vanity Facebook URL back from Merck U.S., Facebook apologized for its 'administr...

First time accepted submitter thegreymonkey writes "Last Friday, an iPhone caught fire on flight ZL319 operating from Lismore to Sydney. This incident is under investigation from Australian Transport ...

Pierre Bezukhov submits news of a report that "a laptop connected wirelessly to the internet on the lap near the testes may result in decreased male fertility," writing"'[The scientists who conducted ...

MackieChan writes with a piece of news that slipped past earlier this month: "Although Barnes & Noble receives a lot of credit from the slashdot community for standing up to Microsoft and for allo...

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos, Europe's Largest IT Company, wants a 'zero email' policy to be in place in 18 months, arguing that only 10 per cent of the 200 electronic messa...

mikejuk writes "Are we getting closer to really effective volumetric 3D display technology? A new display, designed in Russia, uses cold fog and a laser projector to create a volumetric 3D image that ...

Zothecula writes with an excerpt from an article in Gizmag: "The FRAC Centre in Orléans, France will for the first time host an exhibition to be built entirely by flying robots. Titled 'Flight As...

An anonymous reader writes "Due to rising ocean temperatures, scientists from the United States and Australia are attempting to freeze coral eggs and sperm in cryogenic suspension so that the endanger...

danaris writes "On Friday, Rule of Cool gaming released Legend, a d20-derived tabletop roleplaying game system designed to be easy to learn, easy to play, and just really fun. As the names suggest, th...

itwbennett writes "A BBC article outlines a push to make software programming a basic course of study for British schoolchildren in hopes that Britain could become a major programming center for video...

Pierre Bezukhov writes with this excerpt from an article at Doctor Tipster: "A Dutch researcher has created a virus with the potential to kill half of the planet's population. Now, researchers and exp...

MrSeb writes with an article in Extreme Tech about progress toward getting an AOSP build working on the Nexus S. From the article: "Over the past week, ROM Manager extraordinaire Koush has been franti...

angry tapir writes with an excerpt from a Techworld article: "Germany's Merck KGaA has threatened legal action after it said it lost its Facebook page apparently to rival Merck & Co. in the U.S., ...

dotarray writes "Iranian gamers hoping to get their hands on Battlefield 3 will be sorely disappointed, as the country has officially banned EA's latest shooter. Why? The game features an American war...

alphadogg writes "Free software activists have released a peer-to-peer search engine to take on Google, Yahoo, Bing and others. The free, distributed search engine, YaCy, takes a new approach to searc...

Michael J. Ross writes "With more people accessing the Internet using mobile devices than computers, web designers and developers are challenged to make sites that work well on both categories of hard...

jfruhlinger writes "John Spencer, a British blogger and tech educator, is convinced that free and open source software, which he's promoted for years, is costing IT jobs, as UK schools cut support sta...

Sparrowvsrevolution writes "Twitter has confirmed that it's acquiring Whisper Systems, the mobile encryption startup founded by hacker and security researcher Moxie Marlinspike. Marlinspike has built ...

bdking writes "If a recent internal survey and reviews left on glassdoor.com are to be believed, working at social games company Zynga isn't much fun. Zynga's competitive, metrics-driven culture may b...

redletterdave writes "The European Commission plans to put a stop to the way Facebook gathers information about its users, including their political opinions, religious beliefs, whereabouts and sexual...

wiredmikey writes "Here's an interesting take on the IT security industry and tools being sold and used by to monitor internet users. It's no secret that many states and nations are censoring and moni...

phaedrus5001 writes "Ars has an article about two New Jersey DMV employees who have been accused of selling personal information they routinely had access to. The NJ prosecutor's office claims (PDF) t...

An anonymous reader writes "'Houston, we've had a problem,' said astronaut Jack Swigert on April 13, 1970. But the problem wasn't as simple as three astronauts potentially trapped in the void of space...

MrSeb writes "Rohm, a Japanese semiconductor company, has created a silicon chip and antenna that's currently capable of transmitting 1.5Gbps, with the potential to scale up to 30Gbps in the future. W...

Hugh Pickens writes"The 'Earthscraper,' a 65-story, 82,000-square-foot inverted pyramid beneath Mexico City takes a new approach to escalating megacity problems like population growth, urban sprawl, p...

ryzvonusef writes "Instructables Member 'Dimovi' utilized a spare LCD monitor and converted it into a 'privacy' monitor. He took apart the monitor's plastic frame, cutting out the polarized film with ...

xav_jones writes "The ABC is reporting that 'Australia's five major ISPs have revealed their plans to crack down on online piracy by sending warning notices to suspected illegal downloaders while assi...

An anonymous reader writes "I'm essentially a self-taught computer geek who started learning BASIC at age 12, but decided NOT to do the traditional computer-nerd thing (comp sci or physics, computer d...

angry tapir writes "A yet-to-be-patched flaw discovered in the Apache HTTP server allows attackers to access protected resources on the internal network if some rewrite rules are not defined properly....

First time accepted submitter Readycharged writes "The Daily Mail reports on a piece from The Sunday Times revealing that University College London have seen an increasing number of Muslim students bo...

bs0d3 writes "A small VPN service, Koppla, has had its service terminated by its host, Santrex Hosting Solutions. Despite actively advertising their services to be oriented toward file-sharing includi...

dkd903 writes "According to reports from Macotakara, Hitachi Displays Ltd and Sony Mobile Display Corporation has started shipping the screens for the iPad 3 and a 4-inch LCD screen for an unnamed iOS...

Restaurants across the globe will soon use DNA technology to reassure customers that they are getting what they pay for. In recent years getting "counterfeit" seafood has become a big problem. In 2007...

jjp9999 writes "In order to study the nature of lighting, the team at Lightning on Demand (LOD) plans to build two, ten-story-tall Tesla coils—the largest ever—that will blast arcs of ligh...

Med-trump writes "Alberta's $60 million carbon-cutting program is failing, according to the latest report from the Canadian province's auditor-general, Merwan Saher. A news article in Nature adds: 'th...

First time submitter fikx writes "How do slashdotters manage large collections of disks? I'm hoping for a way to manage a large collection of movies that would give me menu type access to the content ...

miller60 writes "Is preventive maintenance on data center equipment not really that preventive after all? With human error cited as a leading cause of downtime, a vigorous maintenance schedule can act...

PolygamousRanchKid writes "China's Commerce Ministry on Friday announced an investigation into U.S. government policy and subsidy support for renewable energy, after a U.S. decision earlier this month...

Zothecula writes "Do you think that you'll never be able to afford a robot of your own that isn't a toy? Well, if you can get Swiss robot-maker K-Team Corporation to sell you one, chances are you can ...

theodp writes "Have you ever hacked into AT&T customer accounts and diverted money to terrorism-financing groups? You will. In 2003, the NY Times reported that AT&T contended U.S. victims of a...

Hugh Pickens writes "The sense of humor is a ubiquitous human trait, yet rare or non-existent in the rest of the animal kingdom. But why do humans have a sense of humor in the first place? Cognitive s...

alphadogg writes "While London's massive Olympic park is still very much a frenetic construction site, IT engineers are fine-tuning the equipment that will be used to transmit scores, let athletes sen...

wiredmikey writes "A tough global economy has certainly created challenges for many people looking for jobs, but one Hungarian man took things to another level in an effort to gain employment at hotel...

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from the NY Times:"[California state leaders] have rallied around a plan to build a 520-mile high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco, cutting the ...

An anonymous reader writes "Linux Mint 12 was released today. It includes the new 'MGSE' (Mint Gnome Shell Extensions), a desktop layer on top of Gnome 3 that makes it possible for you to use Gnome 3 ...

patiwat writes "Thailand has warned Facebook users that they could face 3 to 15 years in jail if they press 'share' or 'like' on images or articles considered unflattering to the Thai monarchy. And it...

Barence writes "Why are IT staff treated with near universal contempt? This article discusses why everyone hates the IT department. From cultivating a culture of 'them and us,' to unrealistic demands ...

theodp writes "The WSJ reports that China's Ministry of Education plans to phase out majors producing unemployable graduates. The government will soon start evaluating college majors by their employme...

The Bad Astronomer writes "Rolf Olsen, an 'amateur' astronomer in New Zealand, took an amazing photo of a disk of material around the star Beta Pictoris, the first time this has been seen outside of p...

hessian tips a story in BusinessWeek about Palantir, a system designed to aggregate disparate data points gathered by intelligence agencies and weave them into a more useful narrative. The article sum...

New submitter ajitk writes "This year, call centers in the Philippines employed 50,000 more people than those in India. From the New York Times article: 'More Filipinos — about 400,000 — t...

An anonymous reader writes "The attempted merger between AT&T and T-Mobile has fallen on hard times amid antitrust concerns, but there's a potential silver lining for T-Mobile — one that wou...

An anonymous reader writes "The DoJ and ICE have once again taken up the banner of anti-piracy and anti-counterfeiting by seizing over 130 domains allegedly involved in those activities. TorrentFreak ...

PolygamousRanchKid writes with this quote from CNN about the future of airport security:"Earlier this year, the International Air Transport Association demonstrated its vision for the 'checkpoint of t...

Hugh Pickens writes "Steve Green writes that even as defendants who defeated Righthaven in court and won their attorney's fees complain they haven't been paid a total of $216,000 and try to seize Righ...

New submitter sirjohn writes with the good news that "A small group of ICS and Nokia engineers have started working on a minimal bootstrap to bring fully functional Qt 5" to the Raspberry Pi, writing ...

bazzalunatic writes "The common golden orb web spider wards of ants from attacking it on its web by spinning an ant repellent (pyrrolidine alkaloid) into its silk. It could be used to develop a new in...

MrSeb writes with this ExtremeTech excerpt aimed at the graphene enthusiasts out there: "You can add another crazy characteristic to graphene's ever-expanding list of 'wonder material' properties: It ...

gManZboy writes "NASA's Mars Science Lab and Curiosity rover are the next steps in a long-term plan to travel farther and faster into space. Check out the future spacecrafts and tools that will get th...

theodp writes "The Atlantic talks to creative director Tom Jenkins about his short film Address Is Approximate, which tells the whimsical story of a toy's journey to the California coast. Jenkins' per...

New submitter b0101101001010000 writes with some news for developers who'd like to work with the newest version of Android: "We've just released preview ICS builds of Freescale's iMX53, ST Ericsson's ...

New submitter silentbrad writes with a followup to our discussion this morning about Ubisoft's claims of overwhelming game piracy. An article at IGN quotes a different point of view from Gabe Newell, ...

An anonymous reader writes "Patent firm IPCom announced today that it wants a ban on sales of HTC's 3G smartphones in Germany, after HTC dropped its appeal to a patent ruling IPCom won. HTC says the a...

zyzko writes "The Register reports that hard drive prices (lowest average unit prices) have rocketed 151% from October 1 to November 14th. The worst days have seen over 5% daily price increases. This ...

An anonymous reader writes "I've managed to go my entire adult life without owning an actual camera. I've owned photosensors that were shoehorned into various other gadgets, but I've gotten to the poi...

An anonymous reader writes "A team of students from Boise University recently shattered the world land speed record for biofuel vehicles by traveling 155 mph in a vegetable oil-powered pick-up truck d...

An anonymous reader writes with news of a plan from the Australian government to cut down on the number of kids who aren't vaccinated. The new scheme will deny family tax benefits to parents whose chi...

New submitter LBeee writes "German Researchers at the Ruhr University Bochum built an FPGA board-based man-in-the-middle attack against the HDCP copy protection used in HDMI connections. After the lea...

itwbennett writes "Terrorist suspect Jose Pimentel had a blog on Google-owned Blogger. And so it follows that Senator Joe Lieberman sent a letter to Google CEO Larry Page taking him to task because 'B...

ProbablyJoe writes "A poll for the BBC shows that worldwide support for nuclear power has dropped significantly in the past 6 years. However, while support has dropped in most countries, the UK has de...

arcite writes "The Mars Science Laboratory Rover 'Curiosity,' an SUV-sized rover packed to the gills with the latest scientific instruments and an innovative landing system, is set to launch tomorrow....

a_hanso writes "A new study suggests that the effects of rising levels of carbon dioxide on temperature may be less significant than previously thought. 'The new models predict that given a doubling i...

PolygamousRanchKid tips this article about an idea for revolutionizing the rail system in the long-term:"The idea is to have a city-wide network of trams that travel in a loop and connect with a high-...

New submitter Azmodan sends this excerpt from TorrentFreak:"Ubisoft is known for laying the blame for many problems on the unauthorized downloading of its games. Stanislas Mettra, creative director of...

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Democracy and free speech activists worldwide have something new to worry about — cyberwarfare via iTunes. The Telegraph reports that Gamma International sells comput...

crudmonkey writes "It took a custom-made submarine, billionaire Paul Allen, and a tenacious desire lasting well beyond two decades to unveil enigmatic details about the life of the coelacanth—th...

Zothecula writes "Insects have served as the inspiration for a number of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) that could be deployed to monitor hazardous situations without putting humans in harm's way. Now rese...

DMandPenfold writes "NASDAQ's aging software and out of date security patches played a key part in the stock exchange being hacked last year, according to the reported preliminary results of an FBI in...

angry tapir writes "Intel is giving new life to its Pentium processor for servers, and has started shipping the new Pentium 350 chip for low-end servers. The dual-core processor operates at a clock sp...

itwbennett writes "Back in October, rumors surfaced (and then quickly subsided) that Microsoft was considering another bid to purchase Yahoo. Now the rumors are back, and this time Microsoft is said t...

An anonymous reader writes Relationships are tough and it looks like AT&T and T-Mobile's has stopped before it even started. From the article: 'AT&T and T-Mobile have announced that they will ...

bukharin writes "As reported by various sites, South Korea is planning a trial of robotic prison guards in Pohang. The idea is that the robots will roll around the prison monitoring conditions inside ...

judgecorp writes "Researchers at Stanford University have invented a battery material that could allow batteries to go through 400,000 charging cycles instead of the 400 or so which today's Li-ion bat...

Hugh Pickens writes "As sports nerds settle in today after Thanksgiving dinner for NFL and college football Reed Albergotti writes that there is some footage you will never see as he argues that the m...

theodp writes "The Mac wasn't the first computer to present the user with a virtual desktop of files and folders instead of a command line and a blinking cursor, but it was the sketchbook of Susan Kar...

First time accepted submitter joost.bijl writes "Yesterday the Dutch government took a step to further improve the adoption of Open Source in its ranks. It has officialy approved a modified version of...

symbolset writes "Update from an earlier story here, where Carrier IQ was pursuing a security researcher for pointing out privacy issues in an application alleged to track and record the activities of...

localman writes with this excerpt from CNET: "Through his hit Web site and three popular books, [author Brendan] Smith has spread the gospel of 'The Brick Testament.' But now, because of what it says ...

destinyland writes "Black Friday has touched off a three-way price war between Apple, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble. Kobo readers dropped their price to just $99 to compete with the Nook, only to disco...

An anonymous reader writes with this note about the winner of an annual Micromouse Robot Competition, writing"The current champion is one Ng Bent Kiat, who works at the Ngee Ann Polytechnic focusing o...

Harperdog writes to this "Excellent piece by Dawn Stover about what renewables can and can't do. The sun and wind may be practically inexhaustible, but 'renewable' energy isn't. Solar, wind, and geoth...

mmcuh writes "Back in 2004, Belgian copyright group Sabam managed to get a court order forcing the ISP Scarlet to filter out filesharing traffic. Scarlet took the case to a national appeals court, whi...

An anonymous reader writes "The future of augmented-reality technology is here — as long as you're a rabbit. Bioengineers have placed the first contact lenses containing electronic displays into...

First time accepted submitter steevven1 writes "My girlfriend and I are planning a long trip across the United States for this summer, and we'd like to see the usual sights, but we both have a bit of ...

wiredmikey writes "About 200 customers of the Central Maine Power Company recently noticed something odd after the utility installed smart meters in their homes: household electronics including wirele...

Barence writes "Dell's website includes a guide to graphics cards for PC novices which contains a dangerous chunk of misinformation. The monitor on the left, labelled as a PC that uses a "standard gra...

lpress writes "Most of today's electronic textbooks are re-purposed versions of print books. Nature has published an e-text that departs from the traditional book format and business model. Their Intr...

cylonlover writes "Automated telephone services may get slightly less annoying thanks to research being carried out at Spain's Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and Universidad de Granada. A team of sc...

angry tapir writes "The battle over scarce radio spectrum that has embroiled the mobile broadband world even extends to a little-known type of wireless network that promises to reconnect the human ner...

mikejuk writes "Stanford University is offering the online world more of its undergraduate level CS courses. These free courses consist of You Tube videos with computer-marked quizzes and programming ...

First time accepted submitter perryizgr8 writes "Facebook Data Team has taken all the friends data of everyone on Facebook and analyzed it, finding out the shortest distance between every two persons....

itwbennett writes "How much does it cost to make a phone app to tell local temperature and suggest how not to get heatstroke, such as drink water and avoid alcohol? If you're the U.S. Government, it'l...

sciencehabit writes "Meet the new flavor of wine: fruity with a hint of fluid dynamics. Oenophiles have long gotten the best out of their reds by giving their glasses a swirl before sipping. A new stu...

antdude writes in with a story about two U.S. malls that plan on tracking shoppers' movements by monitoring the signals from their cell phones this Friday. "The management company of both malls, Fores...

LinuxScribe writes with this bit from IT World: "In an effort to foil crackers' attempts to cover their tracks by altering text-based syslogs, and improve the syslog process as a whole, developers Len...

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Police departments around the country are moving to shield their radio communications from the public as cheap, user-friendly technology has made it easy for anyone to use ...

An anonymous reader writes "Scientists have performed an ecological analysis of software packages in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution over time; they found that dependencies can be successfully model...

MightyMartian writes "The company I work for has just had their government contract renewed, which is good news, giving me several more years of near-guaranteed employment! However, in going through a...

astroengine writes "The lost Russian Mars mission Phobos-Grunt has made a surprise announcement: she's alive. According to the European Space Agency (ESA) in the early hours of Wednesday morning, a tr...

As a security researcher, Moxie Marlinspike has played a big role in explaining what can go wrong in using Certificate Authorities to authenticate SSL traffic, an issue that's been top of mind this ye...

alphadogg writes with troubling news for the network hardware joint-venture between Nokia and Siemens. Quoting the article: "Struggling network infrastructure vendor Nokia Siemens Networks is planning...

knifeyspooney writes "According to the Springfield State Journal-Register, the city's recent public water system failure was not caused by malicious activity. One water district trustee spoke this gem...

MrSeb writes with this excerpt from an article in Extreme Tech: "Light-emitting diodes are a cornerstone of consumer tech. They make thin-and-light TVs and smartphones possible, provide efficient hous...

PolygamousRanchKid writes with an article in CNN Money about Netflix's prospects in 2012. From the article: "Netflix warned in its last earnings report that it expects to be unprofitable 'for a few qu...

judgecorp writes "Two leading Chinese telecoms companies, Huawei and ZTE, are under investigation for possible spying in the U.S. A government committee says the companies may be stealing U.S. economi...

judgecorp writes "Two leading Chinese telecoms companies, Huawei and ZTE, are under investigation for possible spying in the U.S. A government committee says the companies may be stealing U.S. economi...

ryzvonusef writes "VentureBeat's (typically unnamed) sources identifies Intel and Qualcomm as being involved in talks for acquiring the Palm asset portfolio. However, citing sources intimate with HP's...

Hugh Pickens writes "Remember WorldPerfect? Bill Gates took the witness stand to defend his company against a $1 billion antitrust lawsuit that claims Microsoft duped Novell into thinking he would inc...

sciencehabit writes "In 2008, the Italian satellite PAMELA picked up an unusual signal: a spike in antimatter particles whizzing through space. The discovery, controversial at the time, hinted that ph...

HizookRobotics writes "Inflatable robots have the potential to be low-cost, lightweight, extremely powerful, and yet 'human safe' — in other words, perfect for many robotics applications. Here a...

JSC writes "Anne McCaffrey died Monday at her home after suffering a stroke. 'In the late 1960s she became the first woman to win a Hugo Award for a work of fiction and the first woman to win a Nebula...

New submitter Calibax writes "30 years ago, Bob Wallace and his partner came up with a product to help hikers, flood victims and others purify water. Wallace, now 88 years old, packs his product by ha...

PolygamousRanchKid writes "In its effort to curb game addiction among adolescents, South Korea pulled the plug this weekend on young gamers after midnight by blocking access to game websites, putting ...

New submitter kermidge sends in an article at the Physics arXiv blog about what's called the "Internet Water Army," large groups of people in China who are paid to "flood" internet sites with comments...

An anonymous reader writes "Google announced today on its official blog the impending closure of a number of its less successful services. In addition to retiring minor features like Bookmarks List an...

phaedrus5001 sends this quote from a story at Wired:"A data-logging software company is seeking to squash an Android developer's critical research into its software that is secretly installed on milli...

New submitter abesottedphoenix writes "The rural library responsible for the first open source library catalogue is under attack from defence contractor PTFS. More than a decade after rolling out Koha...

An anonymous reader writes "Just like Quake 3 before it, the Doom 3 source code has been released to the public (minus rendering of stencil shadows via the 'depth fail' method, a functionality commonl...

jfruhlinger writes "AT&T's plan to merge with T-Mobile just hit a pretty big snag. The FCC declared the merger would be anti-competitive and not in the public interest."According to the NY Times, ...

mask.of.sanity writes with this excerpt from SC Magazine:"Australian researcher Silvio Cesare has released a tool capable of automatically detecting bugs and vulnerabilities in embedded Linux librarie...

Hugh Pickens writes "James Fallows writes that you don't have to idealize everything about the Occupy movement to recognize the stoic resolve of the protesters at UC Davis being pepper sprayed as a mo...

New submitter kenboldt writes "Someone going by the alias 'foia' has dropped a link to a zip file containing thousands more emails similar to those released in 2009. There are apparently many more whi...

MrSeb writes "According to multiple independent sources, AMD has canned its 28nm Brazos-based Krishna and Wichita designs that were meant to replace Ontario and Zacate in the second half of 2012. The ...

judgecorp writes "Many Syrian government sites and services are hosted outside the country, in the U.S., Canada and Germany. A recent report suggests the hosting services may be breaking international...

An anonymous reader writes "A new study by University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers finds that using computers for instant messaging and e-mail increases lying compared to face-to-face conversa...

New submitter Hermanas writes with the story that South Africa's parliament has passed a Protection of Information Bill which could land whistle blowers and journalists who print classified informatio...

rsk writes "Since the Ubuntu One desktop synchronization service was launched by Canonical it has always been powered by CouchDB, a popular document-oriented NoSQL data store with a powerful master-ma...

New submitter soramimo writes "I'm currently a Ph.D student in Machine Learning and Biology at a pretty good European university. As my lab is moving to the U.S., I have the chance to get my Ph.D from...

Rachel Brown, owner of the small Need a Cake bakery, became a victim of the old adage, "Be careful what you wish for. You might just get it." More than 8,500 people took Rachel up on her Groupon offer...

New submitter fran6gagne writes "AT&T [Monday] notified customers of an effort by hackers to collect online account information. It is not not believed that the perpetrators of this attack obtaine...

In 2009, an autonomous ocean glider bobbed and dipped its way across the Atlantic; now, reader cylonlover writes with word that "Four small autonomous aquatic robots have embarked on a 60,000-kilomete...

Velcroman1 writes "The newest trend in American communication isn't another smartphone from Apple or Google but one of the elder statesmen of communication: Ham radio licenses are at an all time high,...

hweimer writes "I am looking for a small (7") tablet that comes with root access out of the box. I know, I could get one of the usual suspects and root it myself, but I don't want to waste my time in ...

ProbablyJoe writes "AllThingsD is running a series of stories this week about a possible new Facebook phone, codenamed 'Buffy.' The phone is said to be in development by HTC, who collaborated with Fac...

Lauren Weinstein writes "Viacom has just released a video calling for support of global Internet censorship via SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act). A truth annotated version of th...

dartttt writes "Not many people know that Kernel releases have their codenames. Most of the Linux 2.6 and 3.x kernels include a name in the Makefile of their source trees, which can be found in the gi...

Hugh Pickens writes writes "VOA reports that the latest effort to cut the US government's debt apparently has ended in failure as leaders of the special 12-member debt reduction committee plan to anno...

New submitter RobinEggs writes "Some reviews of Bulldozer's server performance have arrived. Ars Technica has the breakdown, and the results are pretty ugly. Apparently Bulldozer fares just as poorly ...

angry tapir writes with this excerpt from Tech World: "Researchers from German security firm Recurity Labs have released a JavaScript implementation of the OpenPGP specification that allows users to e...

First time accepted submitter boley1 writes "According to Cnet — S3 Graphics's case collapsed in their ITC suit, with the ITC ruling that Apple does not infringe on any of S3's patents. A big bl...

An anonymous reader writes "Remember how a shadowy group arose a few months back with the promise of suing thousands of Australians for allegedly pirating movies? ... Well, it looks like the effort ha...

itwbennett writes "In a court filing, Oracle accused HP of secretly contracting with Intel to keep making Itanium processors so that it can continue to make money from its locked-in Itanium customers ...

An anonymous reader writes "After many years I am finally considering entering the smartphone era. Within the mainstream, there seem to be four OS choices: Windows, Android, Blackberry, or iOS: Androi...

New submitter moniker writes "Penguin Group is removing Kindle ebooks from libraries using Overdrive citing 'security concerns' as a weak excuse, while most likely taking a shot at Amazon. One more ex...

wiredmikey writes with this quote from an article about determining whether the recent doom-and-gloom reports about malware on mobile devices are justified:"As twilight approaches for 2011, security v...

An anonymous reader sends in this excerpt from the Fox-IT blog:"During recent weeks we have observed several interesting publications which have a direct relation to an investigation we worked on rece...

Barence writes "Are today's children facing technology overload, or simply gearing themselves up for life in a digital world? This article examines the effects of exposing children to technology at a ...

fergus07 writes "Toyota is to show an autonomous Prius at Tokyo Motor Show. Dubbed the Toyota AVOS (Automatic Vehicle Operation System), the car will be available for members of the public to take 'ba...

bs0d3 writes "Bradley Manning has finally been scheduled for a day in court. On December 16, he will have an Article 32 hearing (military pre-trial). Private Manning has been in jail for one and half ...

misterbarnacles writes "Shareable has an interview with librarian Lauren Britton Smedley from the Fayetteville Free Library, which is adding a Fab Lab to its community offerings. She said, 'I think th...

An anonymous reader writes "This is an interesting article about how technology is shaping the English language, which touches on the fate of the current crop of (sometimes silly) tech-inspired words,...

jfruhlinger writes "Microsoft has quietly announced that it's planning on baking anti-virus protection right into the Windows 8 OS. Users have been criticizing Windows' insecurity for years — bu...

TheNextCorner writes "NASA is getting set to launch its next Mars rover this week. The car-size Curiosity rover is the centerpiece of NASA's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission, slated ...

judgecorp writes "Amazon has poured cold water on the story, but reports insist that Kindles are sometimes rendered useless by airport baggage handling and security checks. Many people report no probl...

alphadogg writes "With early applications to elite colleges at an all-time high, the nation's highest-rated undergraduate computer science programs are bracing for an uptick in applications between no...

eldavojohn writes "In the grand scheme of things, antibiotics are a very temporary solution to aid humans in combating bacteria. Bacterial resistance to said antibiotics is an increasing fear and DARP...

Parents with students at Hale Elementary School in Minneapolis have found something interesting on the back of their children's pictures hanging on the fridge, detailed medical information. From the a...

Trailrunner7 writes "In an e-mail interview with Threatpost, a hacker who compromised software used to manage water infrastructure for South Houston, Texas, said the district had HMI (human machine in...

wisebabo writes "I just noticed that not only are all Afghans going to have their biometric data (fingerprints and iris scans) recorded but the government plans to share it with the U.S. From the arti...

CelticWhisper writes "Targeted at stopping SOPA, a petition has been started at the White House's 'We The People' page calling for a Constitutional amendment that would render internet access an inali...

schwit1 writes "More than 250 cameras in Washington D.C. and its suburbs scan license plates in real time. It's a program that's quietly expanded beyond what anyone had imagined even a few years ago. ...

garymortimer writes with a story (the accompanying video is worth watching) of an unmanned helicopter than can automatically land on a moving surface. Though it's shown landing on a bed of a moving tr...

First time accepted submitter genjix writes "In a few weeks Amelia Andersdotter will be the second Pirate Party member to take a seat at the European Parliament in Brussels. The 24-year-old Swede was ...

mikejuk writes "The world of software is made slightly crazy because of the huge flexibility within any computer language. Once you have absorbed the idea of a compiler written in the language it comp...

bs0d3 writes "Parents are being sold on the idea of buying DNA tests for their kids, to find out which sports they will be better at. The company called Atlas is based in Boulder, Colorado; and is sel...

angry tapir writes "Microsoft has announced a program designed to help 10 developers or startups launch businesses around products for Kinect, the controller that senses motion and voice. Developers w...

astroengine writes "On Friday, the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia registered more than 700 confirmed exoplanets. Although this is an amazing milestone, it won't be long until the 'first thousand' are...

ideonexus writes "Once upon a time, newspapers were considered the "first draft of history." Today, rather than the daily episodic updates of major news stories developing a narrative over time, we ha...

Hugh Pickens writes writes "In a move reminiscent of George Carlin's Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority has handed down a ban on about 1,600 terms and phrase...

Several media sources (here's PC Magazine's version), all seemingly based on an account at SemiAccurate citing (but not naming) "muliple sources," report that Apple originally planned an AMD-chip base...

MahlonS writes "I am a retired network hack wintering in my RV in a campground in southern GA. 3 years ago I reconfigured the Wi-Fi system to a marginal working ability; It's now ready for a serious u...

First time accepted submitter Micah_Altman writes "As the next redistricting battle shapes up in New York, members of the public have an opportunity to create viable alternatives. Unlike the previousl...

theodp writes "Among the new iOS 5 features is Reminders, which Apple explains this way: 'Say you need to remember to pick up milk during your next grocery trip. Since Reminders can be location based,...

An anonymous reader points out an interesting, detailed interview with Andrew Tanenbaum at Linuxfr.org; Tanenbaum holds forth on the current state of MINIX, licensing decisions, and the real reason he...

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Hybrid vehicles are safer than their conventional counterparts when it comes to shielding their occupants from injuries in crashes with the odds of being injured in a crash...

1sockchuck writes "The twice-a-year list of the Top 500 supercomputers documents the most powerful systems on the planet. Many of these supercomputers are striking not just for their processing power,...

superglaze writes "Against the backdrop of governments and courts around the world ordering ISPs to block file-sharing sites, European commissioner Neelie Kroes has said people have started to see cop...

The mixed reviews so far available for the new Amazon Fire tablet mostly address the Fire in its intended role as a locked-down portal through which to buy and consume ready-made content from Amazon. ...

New Kohath writes with this news from The Guardian: "Bottled water producers applied to the EU for the right to claim that 'regular consumption of significant amounts of water can reduce the risk of d...

"The MacBook Air and the Ultrabook come without a piece of hardware that's been a mainstay in laptops for a long time — the optical drive," says a piece at CNET. "Maybe because they really aren'...

thomst writes "The Winnipeg Free Press posts a story by Cassandra Szklarski of the Canadian Press about an email interview with Stephen Hawking in which the astrophysicist and geek hero opines, 'Our o...

bs0d3 writes "A new tax in France is aimed at ISPs. The new government tax on ISPs is to help pay for the CNM (Centre National de la Musique). Already in France there is a tax on TV, to pay for public...

If you'd rather keep your data private, take heart: disk encryption is a lot harder to break than techno-thriller movies and TV shows make it out to be, to the chagrin of some branches of law enforcem...

AmyVernon writes "We combed through about two years' worth of data on SourceForge, looking at the platforms of the users who downloaded projects, and millions more Mac users are downloading open sourc...

New submitter Chuckles08 writes "I'm about to complete the purchase of an electric scooter that is worth over $5,000. Since I'll be parking it on a college campus, it will be vulnerable to theft. I'd ...

First time accepted submitter Xondak writes "The cult series 'Arrested Development' is being resurrected and brought exclusively to Netflix streaming subscribers. This marks the first time a major stu...

gbrumfiel writes "For forty years, the Higgs boson has remained a theoretical construct, but by Christmas, scientists may have a pretty good idea of whether it's real or not. Nature News reports that ...

TheNextCorner writes "Remember how the Stop Online Piracy Act would make streaming of copyrighted material a felony? Many of these lawmakers actually stream copyrighted videos on their websites." Howe...

gManZboy writes "'Sometime early next year, Ford will mail USB sticks to about 250,000 owners of vehicles with its advanced touchscreen control panel. The stick will contain a major upgrade to the sof...

RedEaredSlider passes along this excerpt about what looks like a smart advance in controlling hobbyist robots:"The concept is quite simple: put a wheeled chassis on a smart phone or iPod Touch that al...

Layzej writes "Extreme weather, such as the 2010 Russian heat wave or the drought in the horn of Africa, will become more frequent and severe as the planet warms, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climat...

coondoggie writes "These aren't your basic video gaming systems here. The U.S. government gave Raytheon BBN Technologies $10.5 million today to develop what it called 'serious games' that feature an i...

First time accepted submitter Jeng writes "I'm planning on sending flash drives to friends and family as stocking stuffers. Rather than just send a blank drive, I'm looking for what good useful free s...

SharkLaser writes "Two of the largest porn companies on the internet, Manwin and Digital Playground, yesterday sued both ICANN and ICM Registry, which runs the .xxx TLD, over extorting defensive regis...

suraj.sun sends this excerpt from the BBC:"Particles called D-mesons seem to decay slightly differently from their antiparticles, LHCb physicist Matthew Charles told the HCP 2011 meeting on Monday. Th...

mayberry42 writes "Finally, the wait is over — for European fans, anyway. After months (well, over a year) of delays, the latest adventure of Link is finally out. Reviews for the game are consis...

MrSeb writes "Did you know that Newegg is the second largest e-tailer in the U.S., after Amazon? Perhaps building your own computer isn't dead yet! Matthew Murray was recently invited to take a tour o...

TheNextCorner writes with news that NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has detected ripples and shifts in the sand dunes on Mars, which means the surface of the planet is more dynamic than previously ...

absolut.evil writes "FXI Technologies has taken a dual core smartphone-esque computer and put it into a little USB stick. Neat. This allows you to plug into anything with a screen, USB port, and input...

Maximum Prophet points out a series of articles in Slate about the role of mice and rats in the fight against cancer. The first article discusses the problem of using the same type of animal for many ...

An anonymous reader writes "A new breed of messaging services and mobile Voice over IP clients like Skype are already eating into carrier revenues according to a new study. '... one-third of carriers ...

SpuriousLogic writes with this quote from CNN:"Federal officials confirmed they are investigating whether a cyber attack may have been responsible for the failure of a water pump at a public water dis...

itwbennett writes "As Slashdot readers will recall, Barnes & Noble is being particularly noisy about the patents Microsoft is leveraging against the Nook. Now the bookseller has filed a supplement...

cekerr writes with this excerpt from an article in Nature"The wavefunction is a real physical object after all, say researchers. ... the new paper, by a trio of physicists led by Matthew Pusey at Impe...

New submitter more writes with news that Google has added to its WebP image format the ability to losslessly compress images, and to do so with a substantial reduction in file size compared to the PNG...

ackthpt writes "A team of engineers claims to have created the world's lightest material. Made from a lattice of hollow metallic tubes, the material is less dense than aerogels and metallic foams, yet...

angry tapir writes "The Chinese government is using Internet censorship as a trade weapon against U.S. tech companies trying to do business there. China's ongoing censorship of the Internet is applied...

Stirling Newberry writes "In a terse press release, the U.S. Department of Defense announced the first test of the the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon, which launches on a staged rocket and then glides to ...

theodp writes "GeekWire reports that a pending Microsoft patent for monitoring workplace behavior would do Dwight Schrute proud. Three Microsoft inventors propose curbing obnoxious workplace habits in...

gbrumfiel writes "Earlier this year, the OPERA experiment made the extraordinary claim that they had seen neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. The experiment, located at Gran Sasso in I...

stuckinarut writes "NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has released the highest resolution near-global topographic map of the moon ever created. From the article: '"Our new topographic view of the mo...

Pierre Bezukhov writes "K. pneumoniae is a common cause of pneumonia, urinary tract, and bloodstream infections in hospital patients. The superbug form is resistant even to a class of medicines called...

Orome1 writes "Businesses are on average backing up to tape once a month, with one alarming statistic showing 10 percent were only backing up to tape once per year, according to a survey by Vanson Bou...

hweimer writes "A new study by a French government agency, commissioned in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, found that all French nuclear power plants do not offer adequate safety when it comes to ...

itwbennett writes "Slashdot readers will recall that the SOPA hearings earlier this week 'excluded any witnesses who advocate for civil rights. Google's Katherine Oyama was the only witness to object ...

An anonymous reader writes "A new study has shown that people subconsciously retain information about things they've seen even if they can't consciously remember. From the article: 'Luis Martinez of C...

An anonymous reader writes "Canadian robotic design house eatArt has released a video of its latest project: the Titanoboa, a robotic snake based on a 50-foot long prehistoric serpent. The video pits ...

angry tapir writes "PayPal has launched a Facebook application designed to let users of the social networking site send money to each other. The application, named Send Money, features a greeting card...

Velcroman1 writes "Slashdotters read Monday about strange symbols in the Gobi Desert recently imaged and indexed by Google Maps. Alien landing zones? Some military thingy? Bizarre art project? Nope. T...

Hugh Pickens writes "Once feared for its grotesque pustules and 30% death rate, smallpox was eradicated worldwide as of 1978 and is known to exist only in the locked freezers of a Russian scientific i...

An anonymous reader writes "Since most readers of slashdot are IT'ers, I assume this is a familiar story: when working in IT, it often happens you need to be standby or 'on call' during a certain peri...

In an attempt to finally "think of the children," Earl Beatty Publid school has prohibited students from playing with balls after a "few serious incidents" in which students and staff were hit or almo...

bs0d3 writes "The EU Parliament has adopted, 'by a large majority,' a statement warning the US to refrain 'from unilateral measures to revoke IP addresses or domain names' due to the 'need to protect ...

An anonymous reader writes "Major names from the world of computing and technology such as Vint Cerf, William Gibson, Richard Stallman, Michael Dell and Hermann Hauser have shared their memories on th...

jfruhlinger writes "The infrastructure of a large data center poses two main problems: You need to find a way to reliably power all those servers, and you need to figure out a way to deal with the hea...

jhigh writes "An Austrian security researcher is scheduled to release the first 'bootkit' for Windows 8 at the upcoming MalCon in Mumbai. This exploit loads in the MBR and stays memory resident until ...

redletterdave writes "Apple reportedly sent five employees to meet with five different Chinese environmental groups on Nov. 15, only to learn about several troubling environmental issues at as many as...

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister discusses why code analysis and similar metrics provide little insight into what really makes an effective software development team, in the wake of a ...

jfruhlinger writes "The ubiquitous EULA — reams of baffling text imposing draconian terms on software users — infuriate most Slashdot users and are routinely ignored by everyone else (unti...

coondoggie writes "By 2020, the Shackleton Energy Company says it intends to be operating the world's first lunar base and propellant depot for all manner of spacecraft. Shackleton stated that after a...

fergus07 writes "Swiss watchmaker Hublot has created a scaled-down working replica of the ancient Antikythera mechanism. The question is — why on Earth would you want to strap one of these to yo...

An anonymous reader writes "Desura is a digital distribution platform for video games, focusing on releases from indie developers and mods rather than AAA titles. After a two-month beta period, Desura...

mcgrew writes "CNN is reporting another Occupy movement — Occupy Flash. Their aim: get rid of Flash completely. They explain: 'Why does it matter when HTML5 has clearly won the fight for the fut...

New submitter PerlJedi writes "There is a very cool write up on the Make blog about an effort to build the world's largest tesla coils. Quoting: '"Somehow lightning can generate huge discharges with o...

An anonymous reader writes "In policy debates before Congress and the FCC, the big ISPs and wireless carriers (Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Cox, Sprint) argued that net neutrality rules would give them...

Hugh Pickens writes "In an age of drones and lightweight weaponry, the U.S. Air Force's purchase of the first batch of 30,000-pound bombs designed to pulverize underground enemy hide-outs highlights t...

Morty writes "BIND, the popular DNS server software, has been crashing all over the Internet. The root cause is believed to be a 0-day vulnerability in BIND's resolver. The ISC has issued an alert. Qu...

DaveyJJ writes "Once again, it seems Apple is about to take intellectual property claims to a new level. Apple has been reissued a patent they acquired from Xerox that pretty much wraps up what we kno...

MrSeb writes "'Last week, Intel announced that it had added x86 optimizations to Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, but the text of the announcement and included quotes were vague and a bit contradictor...

Harperdog writes "This is an interesting piece on U.S. programs most people don't know about: programs to identify and win over nuclear scientists who might be willing to sell their know-how to non-nu...

An anonymous reader writes "CNET suggests that Apple has totally changed the general public's perception of programmers: It's now suddenly cool to code. No matter what platform you're on. They argue t...

twoheadedboy writes "BT today revealed it is to start selling its Physical Infrastructure Access (PIA) for fiber broadband product to other providers later this month, but the announcement was met wit...

fergus07 writes "Developed by a 17-year-old electronics and programming whiz from Honduras, the Eyeboard system is a low-tech eyeball-tracking device that allows users with motor disabilities to enter...

angry tapir writes "Google Music, the company's cloud-based online music service, is now available to all users in the US and includes song and album sales, as well as an integration with the Google&p...

An anonymous reader writes "A team from UC San Diego is using crowd-sourcing as a tool to solve the most complicated puzzle ever attempted, which involves piecing together roughly 10,000 pieces of dif...

Orome1 writes "A group of researchers from the Warsaw University of Technology have devised a relatively simple way of hiding information within VoIP packets exchanged during a phone conversation. The...

Coolhand2120 writes "Gamers always felt they had more grey matter. The LA Times reports there is now proof: 'Fourteen-year-olds who were frequent video gamers had more gray matter in the rewards cente...

UnknowingFool writes "In a vote of 9-3, a jury found that Micron and Hynix did not collude to manipulate DRAM prices in a violation of California anti-trust law against Rambus. The jury also ruled tha...

Weezul writes "Today's House Judiciary Committee meeting on the Stop Online Piracy Act excluded any witnesses who advocate for civil rights. Google's Katherine Oyama was the only witness to object to ...

zokuga writes "ProPublica reports that the TSA is backing off a previous promise to conduct a new independent study of X-ray body scanners used at airport security lanes around the country. Earlier th...

An anonymous reader writes "Protesters in Syria, dealing with a strict media blackout, have rolled out new iPhone and iPad apps to share news, stories, and even jokes. Amid a brutal crackdown, rebels ...

PolygamousRanchKid writes "This week while speaking at the Techonomy conference, DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg told audience members that they'd formulated the solution for real-time ren...

astroengine writes "New research shows the jumbled ice blocks crowning the surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa are signs of large liquid lakes below, a key finding in the search for places where life...

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner takes a first look at Oracle NoSQL Database, the company's take on the distributed key-value data store for the enterprise. 'There are dozens of small ways in w...

phaedrus5001 wrote in with a story about an unusual plan to regulate the temperature of Ulan Bator, the capital city of Mongolia. The article reads: "The city of Ulan Bator will attempt to capture som...

Lawrence_Bird writes "The Feds helped break up the Occupy protests by providing advice and assistance from the FBI and DHS. From the article: 'Oakland Mayor Jean Quan said on Monday that her city and ...

HolyLime writes "I'm a librarian in a small academic library. Increasingly the administration is asking our department to collect data on various aspects of our activities, class taught, students help...

Trailrunner7 writes "Researchers are fairly confident now that whoever wrote the Duqu malware was also involved in developing the Stuxnet worm. They're also confident that they have not yet identified...

MasterPatricko writes "The openSUSE project is proud to present the release of openSUSE 12.1! This release represents more than eight months of work by our international community and brings you the b...

MojoKid writes "At the supercomputing conference SC2011 yesterday, Intel announced its new Xeon E5 processors and demoed their new Knights Corner many integrated core (MIC) solution. The new Xeons won...

An anonymous reader writes "French researchers have demonstrated a robot that controls its own arm as well as a person's arm to manipulate objects in a collaborative manner, IEEE reports. Electrodes a...

daem0n1x writes "Could this be the breakthrough we've all been expecting that will finally make the electric car a reality? Researchers of Northwestern University USA discovered a new way to build lit...

First time accepted submitter Kompressor writes "According to a developer on the XDA forums, TrevE, many Android, Nokia, and BlackBerry smartphones have software called Carrier IQ that allows your car...

alphadogg writes "Romanian authorities have arrested a 26-year old hacker who is accused of breaking into multiple NASA servers and causing $500,000 in damages to the U.S. space agency's systems. Robe...

An anonymous reader writes "id Software is still planning to release the Doom 3 source this year, but it's been delayed by a patent issue that's causing John Carmack to personally rewrite some of the ...

angry tapir writes "Arthur Levinson, former CEO of biotech company Genentech, is taking on the chairmanship of Apple's board, filling the role that Apple founder Steve Jobs vacated when he died last m...

Adrian Lopez writes "Techdirt reports that 'apparently, the folks behind SOPA are really scared to hear from the opposition. We all expected that the Judiciary Committee hearings wouldn't be a fair fi...

MrSeb writes with this excerpt from an Extreme Tech article: "With 400 transistors and standard CMOS manufacturing techniques, a group of MIT researchers have created the first computer chip that mimi...

An anonymous reader writes with a new twist in the recently resolved Canadian music label infringement lawsuit. From the article: "Earlier this year, the four primary members of the Canadian Recording...

itwbennett writes "Facebook has reduced the amount of personal data it releases to users as required by European Union law. Due to the volume of requests since Europe v. Facebook began its campaign, F...

In his first submission, kierny writes "A W3C working group is crafting two standards, due out by summer 2012, to enable consumers to opt out of online tracking. Numerous big players are involved, inc...

Kozar_The_Malignant writes "Microsoft shareholders left today's annual meeting grumbling about the 15 minute Q&A period with Bill Gates and Steve Balmer and the lack of any real specifics about co...

holy_calamity writes "Technology Review has an update on a screen technology from Qualcomm called Mirasol that delivers LCD-like colors and video but sips power like e-ink. Demonstration Android table...

iONiUM writes "In a somewhat surprising end to the ongoing fight between large ISPs (a duopoly in Canada), and independent ISPs, the CRTC has ruled in favor of the small ISPs. This means that independ...

jfruhlinger writes "One of the more profound ways that the iPhone changed the mobile industry was the fact that it upended the relationship between the handset maker and the wireless carrier: Apple se...

An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday, the final Raspberry Pi printed circuit board (PCB) layout was revealed. The word 'packed/ comes to mind as this is one very complicated looking board. The reason...

redletterdave writes "PETA believes Nintendo's iconic plumber Mario takes a 'pro fur' stance" because he 'wears the skin of a raccoon dog to give him special powers' in the new handheld game released ...

Trailrunner7 writes "Security researchers claim that malware spreading via malicious PDF files is signed with a valid certificate stolen from the Government of Malaysia, in just the latest evidence th...

hessian writes "Skilled readers can recognize words at lightning fast speed when they read because the word has been placed in a visual dictionary of sorts, say Georgetown University Medical Center (G...

An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica reports on the developing story between the RIAA and music reseller ReDigi, 'the world's first online marketplace for used digital music,' who first came onlin...

ideonexus writes "CNET has obtained a statement to be released by the Department of Justice tomorrow defending its broad interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) that defines violatio...

Julie188 writes "B&N is really blowing the lid off of what Microsoft is doing and how they are forcing money from Android. It has accused Microsoft of requiring overly restricted NDA agreements fr...

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Variety reports that David Yates, who directed the last four Harry Potter films, is teaming up with the BBC to turn its iconic sci-fi TV series Doctor Who into a Hollywood ...

Zothecula writes "Russian aircraft company MiG is best known for its fighter planes which have been used by the USSR, China, North Korea and North Vietnam since the beginning of WWII. These days, the ...

An anonymous reader writes "While there has been a port of Tor for jailbroken iOS devices for a long time, there was no way to use it if you did not want to lose your warranty. Now it looks like Apple...

From reader Leebert comes this notice: NASA will hold a conference this afternoon to explain the process the agency will use to select the next class of astronauts. According to the announcement, "NAS...

EmagGeek writes "My wife recently started back to school to finish her 4-year degree, and one of the things that we've been considering is procuring for her some kind of tablet that would enable her t...

New submitter ProbablyJoe writes "InfoQ reports that Adobe is to donate its web application SDK, Flex, to an 'an established open source foundation' — suspected to either be the Open Spoon Found...

AmiMoJo writes "New research has found that radioactive material in parts of north-eastern Japan exceeds levels considered safe for farming. The findings provide the first comprehensive estimates of c...

harrymcc writes "On November 15th 1971, Intel introduced the 4004 — the first single-chip microprocessor. Its offspring, needless to say, went on to change the world. But first, Intel tried usin...

TripleP writes "In a kind gesture from Google, they're allowing wireless AP owners to opt out of their location service. You only have to change your SSID to include '_nomap' as a suffix. Is it just m...

SharkLaser writes "Minecraft, the most widely known and best selling indie game in the history, is now finished. Minecraft creator Notch tweeted yesterday that Minecraft has gone gold and will be rele...

natecochrane writes "An Australian bank has raised the possibility of offering better deals to customers who share its social network activities with it. But at the same security conference at which C...

wiredmikey writes with an analysis of a GAO report on the dismal failure of the IRS to implement secure IT practices. From the article: "The Government Accountability Office has blasted the Internal R...

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Microsoft Research and Cornell identified a potential flaw in Bitcoin's transaction propagation. In a recent paper they show how miner nodes in the Bitcoin n...

OverTheGeicoE writes "The European Union has adopted a proposal to regulate airport body scanners at Member State airports. No Member State or airport is obligated to use scanners, but if they do, the...

First time accepted submitter Red_Chaos1 was the first to write with news that, as of around 06:30 UTC, the NYPD appears to have begun removing the encampment of Occupy Wall Street. At 06:34 UTC the M...

First time accepted submitter Beowulf878 writes "In yet another data-collection feast by the government in the UK, a local council has proposed fitting at least one CCTV camera per taxi to record ever...

First time accepted submitter jisom writes with something that will probably not be working come morning. Quoting the source: "Today, we managed to crack open Siri's protocol. As a result, we are able...

mikejuk writes with an excerpt from an article in I Programmer: "If you have ever thought that you could do a better job than Google but were intimidated by the hardware needed to build a web index, t...

grcumb writes "Looks like the folks at Google have made good on their promise to release the Android 4.0 source code. Android software engineer Jean-Baptiste Queru writes: 'Hi! We just released a bit ...

RulerOf writes "A few years ago, my girlfriend's grandfather was diagnosed with Macular Degeneration. Ever since, he has had progressively more trouble with daily activities. While his wife and family...

vbraga writes "New photos have appeared in Google Maps showing unidentified titanic structures in the middle of the Chinese desert. The first one is an intricate network of what appears to be huge met...

nonprofiteer writes "Noah Kravitz worked as a mobile phone reviewer for a tech website called Phonedog for four and a half years. While there, he started a Twitter account (of his own volition) with t...

Honken writes "A recent study by scientists at Duke University has found that transparent deep-sea octopuses turn red when exposed to blue light similar to what predators emit, allowing them to hide u...

Meshach writes "The New York Times has an interesting article about how Google has revealed some of the inner workings of the Google Search service. The main change is that sites that are not in Engli...

primesuspect writes "Coming in close to the 10th anniversary of the format and billed as a 'motherboard for digital home media DIY enthusiasts,' VIA have paired their Nano X2 1.4ghz dual-core CPU with...

bs0d3 writes "Amelia Andersdotter is a member of the Swedish Pirate Party elected in 2009. Originally her votes were not enough to beat fellow pirate Christian Engstrom for a seat on the European Parl...

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Oklahoma is typically seismically stable, with about 50 small quakes a year — but in 2009, that number jumped up to more than 1,000 and on November 5 a 5.6-magnitude ...

mouthbeef writes "The Guardian just published my investigative story on the BBC and Ofcom's abuse of secrecy laws to hide the reasons for granting permission for DRM on UK public broadcasts. The UK pu...

angry tapir writes "After a brief delay and more than a year of chatter, Advanced Micro Devices has announced the availability of its first 16-core Opteron server chips, which pack the largest number ...

You asked Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer, questions on topics ranging from debunking superstition to extraterrestrial life to funding space exploration; read on below for his answers. Thanks for t...

MrSeb writes "Ahead of tomorrow's full-scale launch of Amazon's new wunderkind, panacea, and lynch-pin of its continuing distribution domination, initial reviews of the Kindle Fire are starting to tri...

Stirling Newberry writes "New York Times has a report on web-surfing speed tests that their reporter ran using Glasnost, a tool that mimics the bittorrent protocol and measures the results. BT in the ...

snydeq writes "Active Directory object catalogs, quad-core processors, Debian default configurations, Star Trek TNG guest appearances — find out how much you know where it really counts by takin...

Zothecula writes "The humble Petri dish may soon be a thing of the past. A team of researchers in Germany have developed a new technique for treating plastic bags with plasmas to turn them into sealed...

judgecorp writes "Electricite de France (EDF) which uses nuclear reactors to generate the majority of France's electricity, has been found guilty of hacking into Greenpeace computers in 2006. EDF has ...

wiredmikey writes "Supercomputer maker Cray today said that the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) awarded the company a contract to build a supercomputer f...

MojoKid writes "Today marks the release of Intel's Sandy Bridge-E processor family and its companion X79 Express chipset. The first processor to arrive is the Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition, a six-core...

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Anyone who is partial to ketchup with their food will know how difficult it is to get the final dregs from the bottle but now the Telegraph reports that scientists have cre...

bs0d3 writes "In Leipzig, Germany, an 8 hour music/dance party event was organized to play nothing but creative commons music the entire time. A German copyright group called GEMA told the organizers ...

phaedrus5001 writes "Tech Crunch is reporting that one of the co-founders of Diaspora, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, has passed away. He was only 22. At the moment, the cause of his death is unknown." Re...

tekgoblin writes "For some reason Michael Skopec of Illinois thought that calling 911 would get his broken iPhone fixed. It got him arrested instead. From the article: 'After the five calls were made ...

angry tapir writes "Wrapped in the code the Duqu worm uses to infect computers is the message: 'Copyright (c) 2003 Showtime Inc. All rights reserved. DexterRegularDexter.' An analysis of the worm has ...

bs0d3 writes "Schools nationwide, including The University of Missouri and Washington University, are snapping up .xxx domain names to avoid people making porn sites with their names in the url. The n...

Gunkerty Jeb writes "Researchers at Core Security Technologies have uncovered a security hole that could allow someone to circumvent the application sandbox restrictions of Mac OS X. The report of the...

gManZboy writes "What kind of smartphone should a soldier have? Ahead of the impending expiration of two communications contracts, the Army's 5th Signal Command is prepping for the possibility of buyi...

n01 writes "A recently published app for the iOS platform uses the propagation of sound waves to measure distances of up to 25 meters in a dual device mode. The technique works through repeatedly send...

Rui Lopes writes "After a 5 year hiatus, the IOCCC (International Obfuscated C Code Contest) is back! This marks the 20th edition of the contest. Submissions are open between 12-Nov-2011 11:00 UTC and...

kenekaplan writes "American ingenuity and innovation, the twin engine of the country's economy since World War II, is in danger of losing steam and job growth potential if federal legislators allow 'a...

wanzeo writes "Within the last decade, many of us have experienced the encroachment of ethics into our mealtime. Phrases such as vegetarian, vegan, organic, bST, GMO, etc. have become part of common g...

wanzeo writes "An undersea volcano is erupting off the coast of the Canary Islands, bringing the potential for new land formation. The lava peak has grown 100 meters from the ocean floor, and is now j...

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from TorrentFreak:"The biggest misperception about [the Stop Online Piracy Act] is that it is somehow unprecedented or extraordinary. It is not. SOPA repre...

Hugh Pickens writes "Betrayal, lust, secrecy, power: there's no shortage of dramatic intrigue in the story of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Perhaps that's why work has begun on an opera based on the l...

An anonymous reader writes "Wired reports on Harvest Automation, a Massachusetts company developing small robots that can perform basic agricultural labor. The ones currently being tested in greenhous...

jearbear writes "Can crowdfunding work for science? Having raised nearly $40,000 for scientific research in 10 days for projects as diverse as biofuel catalyst design to the study of cellular cilia to...

An anonymous reader writes sends this excerpt from CNN:"The vast majority of top executives at the leading Silicon Valley tech firms are white men. Women and Asians have made some inroads, but African...

MarkWhittington writes "Andrew Chaikin, the author of A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, believes that the spirit of Apollo no longer resides at NASA, but rather in the nascent c...

An anonymous reader writes "Google has sent out press invitations to an event on Wednesday where it's expected they'll unveil their long-rumored Google Music download service. CNET reports that while ...

New submitter Pierre Bezukhov writes "Researchers Roger Guimera and Marta Sales-Pardo of Spain set out to ask whether one of the nine Supreme Court justices could be plucked from the bench and replace...

zacharye writes with news that Motorola has reinvented their popular RAZR clam-shell phone as an Android smartphone. The new device is 4G LTE-capable and 7.1mm thick, and it contains "a 1.2GHz dual-co...

PolygamousRanchKid writes with news of a recent court order during divorce proceedings: both parties must give their social networking passwords to the other, so that each side can snoop for evidence....

Diggester sends this quote from an article at the BBC:"The ID24 beam line at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility will use X-ray beams to subject iron and other materials to extraordinary tempe...

JabrTheHut writes "The Guardian has a story of how Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir, a former WikiLeaks volunteer, is challenging the U.S.'s acquisition of Twitter account information, IP addresses, m...

Three weeks after undergoing a crash test, a Chevy Volt caught fire. The car's battery was determined as the cause of the fire, though GM said its protocols for deactivating the battery following a cr...

dcblogs writes "Indian and U.S. companies are holding a job fair at the San Jose Convention Center this weekend for jobs in India. The job fair is aimed at Indian workers in the U.S., but anyone with ...

littlekorea writes "The growth in peer-to-peer file sharing surged in response to efforts by the content industry to litigate over the past decade, according to a new study by a researcher at Melbourn...

mikejuk writes with this excerpt: "Meet Wu and Kong — the latest in ping pong playing robots. They may not achieve exciting matches at the moment, but the fact that they can do the job at all is...

itwbennett writes "In a court case between Hotfile.com and Hollywood studios, Warner Brothers admitted they sent takedown orders for thousands of files they didn't own or control. Using an automated t...

First time accepted submitter paysonwelch writes "I am a developer and entrepreneur and I am considering developing a very graphically rich and custom interface for my latest application which does ch...

sanzibar writes "The Zeta's killed and beheaded an Internet blogger Wednesday in Nuevo Laredo, the fourth slaying in the city involving people associated with social media sites since early September....

An anonymous reader writes "This article has an interesting round-up of how chipmakers are handling the dwindling returns of pursuing Moore's Law. Intel's about four years ahead of the rest of the sem...

An anonymous reader tips news that, right on schedule after Tuesday's Firefox 8.0 launch, Mozilla has rolled out the beta of Firefox 9.0. This update brings a significant boost to JavaScript performan...

theshowmecanuck writes "The Telegraph has an article talking about the 60th anniversary of The Lyons Electronic Office I (LEO I), complete with an old video from the mid 50s about LEO II. The LEO I wa...

tekgoblin writes "Cryptic Studios, the developer of the Star Trek Online MMO, announced that they are switching to a Free-to-Play model on January 17th. Free subscribers to the game will be able to pl...

Barence writes "Britain's biggest ISPs are struggling to convince customers to upgrade to superfast broadband. Of the six million customers who can get fiber broadband from BT, Britain's biggest ISP, ...

An anonymous reader writes "The Linux kernel power bug that caused high power usage for many Intel Linux systems has finally been addressed. Matthew Garrett of Red Hat has devised a solution for the A...

gManZboy writes "There's a thriving trade in zero-day vulnerabilities, predicated on keeping knowledge of these vulnerabilities out of the public domain. For security researchers with knowledge of a b...

New submitter benfrog writes "Despite repeated attempts over the past few days, Russia is unable to make contact with Phobos-Grunt, the probe that was supposed to make it to Mars and never left Earth'...

formaggio writes "Designer Chris Hoffmann developed the Ryno, a heavy duty electric unicycle with a top speed of 25 mph, a range of up to 30 miles and an impressive 25-inch thick tire. The cost for a ...

eldavojohn writes "Helium white dwarf stars are now theorized to produce a new kind of quasiparticle that would explain a known temperature anomaly between helium white dwarfs and vanilla white dwarfs...

An anonymous reader writes "Logitech CEO Guerrino De Luca spoke bluntly about Google TV yesterday, referring to it as a 'beta' product and saying that relying on it for the Revue set-top boxes was a m...

MrSeb writes "In the Linux world, a war has been raging for a couple years. At stake are the hearts and minds of its user base. The combatants: the various distributions of Linux itself. For some time...

New submitter cekerr sends this quote from Discovery News:"U.S. scientists have found two interstellar clouds of original gas, which contain only original elements created moments after the universe's...

An anonymous reader writes "The 'Big Four' music labels are about to become the 'Big Three.' Universal Music Group is buying the recorded music unit of EMI for $1.9 billion. It's expected that a conso...

An anonymous reader writes "The 'Big Four' music labels are about to become the 'Big Three.' Universal Music Group is buying the recorded music unit of EMI for $1.9 billion. It's expected that a conso...

Today marks the release of Skyrim, the fifth installment of Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls series. The game is set about 200 years after the events of Oblivion, at which point the province of Skyrim is ...

An anonymous reader writes "An article at silicon.com explores how the use of technology might be changing the brain — including interviews with Nicholas Carr and Susan Greenfield. 'The research...

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister sees Adobe's shift toward HTML5 as a boon for developers only if the company secures its place in the Web developer tools market — but initial si...

PolygamousRanchKid writes with an excerpt from SlashGear about Sony's efforts to reinvent the television set — a task many suspect Apple is focused on as well. Quoting:"'There's a tremendous amo...

tearmeapart writes "It may be time again for another discussion/flamewar on the reasons why a lot of us are (still) using Microsoft. The last big discussion on Slashdot was close to 10 years ago, and ...

cylonlover writes "Fingerprints have been used to confirm or determine peoples' identities for over one hundred years now, but new technology is allowing them to be put to another use — drug tes...

An anonymous reader writes "Facebook has reached an agreement with the FTC to make all future changes to privacy settings opt-in, presumably including new features with their own privacy controls. The...

CmdrStone writes "The Universe is ending in the eyes of LEGO. (Cheap pun, I know.) From the announcement: 'We are very sad to announce that LEGO Universe will be closing on January 31, 2012. This was ...

coondoggie writes "Researchers from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will next week detail a new program it hopes will develop technology to dramatically change computer system security a...

zacharye writes "Amazon's upcoming Kindle Fire could be the hottest tablet on the market this holiday season, with demand that may even surpass Apple's blockbuster slate, the iPad 2. Results from a re...

ardmhacha writes "Zynga seem to think they were overly generous handing out stock to early employees. Fearing a 'Google Chef' situation they are leaning on some employees to hand back their unvested s...

SKYMTL writes "Valve has revealed that hackers have gained access to the Steam database and have pulled a variety of information. A statement from Gabe Newell reads in part: 'Dear Steam Users and Stea...

hypnosec writes "From later this month, Google has decided to stop providing its popular Gmail app for BlackBerry. This can be viewed as a shock for RIM as they are putting in strong efforts to preven...

An anonymous reader writes "Johannes Caspar, data protection commissioner for the German state of Hamburg, today declared he will soon fine Facebook over its use of biometric facial recognition techno...

Orome1 writes "In Russia, most cell phone SIM cards are prepaid. One of the major Russian operators offers a legal service that allows anyone to transfer the prepaid amount of money from a SIM card to...

Wired reports that "The Justice Department is entitled to records of the Twitter accounts used by three current and former WikiLeaks associates, a federal judge ruled Thursday, dealing a victory to pr...

hackingbear excerpts from a story at Engadget: "Instead of resting on its laurels as China's third-largest wireless provider, China Telecom is now looking to branch out into relatively uncharted water...

An anonymous reader writes "The first full-scale test of the National Emergency Alert System failed on Tuesday at 2 PM. Some radio and television networks did not air any alert, while the performance ...

jfruhlinger writes "Edward Naughton has been insisting for months that Android violates the GPL because Google created a new set of Linux kernel headers that it hasn't released the source code for, de...

First time accepted submitter LeDopore writes "Quantum computers might be coming. I'd estimate that there's a 10% chance RSA will be useless within 20 years. Whatever the odds, some of the data we sen...

Lucas123 writes "The military's a great place to learn how to kill people and break things, but many also consider it one of the best training grounds for high-tech skills. 'If you're working on a shi...

An anonymous reader writes "The NY Times explores some of the best ways to teach kids and finds that some of the new tools are encouraging the kids share their work with each other. One teacher first ...

l_bratch writes, quoting from the BBC, "'British computer chip designer ARM has unveiled its latest graphics processing unit (GPU) for mobile devices. The Mali-T658 offers up to ten times the performa...

First time accepted submitter JoeMerchant writes "An international team of synthetic biologists, led by professor of computer science Natalio Krasnogor at the University of Nottingham, hopes to revolu...

taweili writes "A tweet from Shanghai Morning Newspaper's Weibo account, Shanghai Government Technology committee has issued a call for proposal to build 100 community hackerspaces with government fun...

An anonymous reader writes "The United States Senate will vote sometime today on the bill that would repeal the net neutrality laws that the FCC has put into place. The bill passed the US House back i...

Harperdog writes "Hugh Gusterson has a great article on the troubles at Los Alamos over the last decade. Since the late 1990s, nuclear weapons scientists at the US Department of Energy's Los Alamos Na...

Thorfinn.au writes "EU politicians are mulling new data protection laws that could make Europe a hostile place for social networks. The EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding and the German Federal Mi...

iONiUM writes "As a follow up to the previous slashdot story, there has been a new release by the IEA indicating that within 5 years we will have irreversible climate change. According to the IEA, 'Th...

tetrahedrassface writes "NASA successfully test fired the J-2X engine Wednesday for 500 seconds at Stennis Space Center. The J2-X is derived from the J2 engine from the Apollo Era, and will power the ...

angry tapir writes "Oracle has updated its Unix-based operating system Solaris, adding some features that would make the OS more suitable for running cloud deployments, as well as integrating it more ...

jfruhlinger writes "Four senators, including both Democrats and Republicans, have introduced a bill that would allow (but not require) states to collect sales tax on items purchased by residents onlin...

misterbarnacles writes "A Cartography of the Anthropocene maps the various ways that global humanity connects and is interdependent. From the article: 'Using data gathered from US government agencies,...

TMB writes "In a move that The Simpson's foretold, thieves have begun stealing inedible kitchen grease for use in biofuels. From the article: 'It's known as inedible kitchen grease, or IKG, which was ...

An anonymous reader writes "NASA has just revealed a new, super-black material, claiming it is the most light absorbent material ever developed, and capable of absorbing 99% of ultraviolet, infrared, ...

coondoggie writes "U.S. law enforcement today said it had smashed what it called a massive, sophisticated Internet fraud scheme that injected malware in more than four million computers in over 100 co...

MrSeb writes "Just a couple of months after nanoengineers at Tufts University developed an 18-atom single-molecule electric motor, researchers from the University of Twente in the Netherlands have gon...

itwbennett writes "Following Tuesday's report that HP is looking to sell WebOS, CEO Meg Whitman and HP employees gathered for a late-afternoon meeting. According to The Verge, Whitman told those gathe...

gManZboy writes "JPMorgan Chase and other companies at this year's Hadoop World conference came begging for job applicants: They say they can't find enough IT pros with certain skills, including Hadoo...

bigsexyjoe writes "I am a somewhat experienced software developer who is pretty much an office drone. I used to enjoy writing code. I even enjoyed writing routine code before it became routine. But no...

Med-trump writes "Scientists report that they have made a non-DNA molecular knot. They created a 160-atom-loop with five crossing points, a molecular pentafoil knot. The researchers used a technique k...

SharkLaser writes "Silverlight 5 might be last version released by Microsoft. Several industry insiders and partners for the last few weeks have heard from their own Microsoft sources that there won't...

theodp writes "NYU risk engineering prof Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a suggestion that won't sit too well with the banksters. In his NY Times op-ed, Taleb writes: 'I have a solution for the problem of b...

Zothecula writes "Although police officers in most countries are issued bulletproof vests, they don't necessarily wear them at all times — would you want to heave one of those things around for ...

Hugh Pickens writes "The 50 million individuals who have downloaded 'Angry Birds' play roughly 200 million minutes of the game a day, which translates into 1.2 billion hours a year, more than ten time...

First time accepted submitter Daaelarius writes "Comcast has begun deployment of Native IPv6 access to end users. The deployment is starting out small with a single market, but is expected to expand r...

MojoKid writes with an article in Hot Hardware about the fancy new Asus tablet/laptop hybrid. Quoting thearticle: "Asus and nVidia have collectively taken the wraps off the next-generation version of ...

larry bagina writes "Jason Perlow of ZDNet is reporting that Adobe will stop developing Flash for mobile browsers and focus on AIR and HTML5 tools. I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if 750 v...

Velcroman1 writes "The World Wide Web red-light district is poised to explode. After more than a decade of debate, rejections and legal challenges, the Internet's governing body began accepting applic...

greenrainbow writes "Philips just unveiled a new concept for an urban beehive that would allow anyone to become an amateur bee keeper – even those who live in apartments with no backyards. Best ...

sciencehabit writes with an article in Science about a new way to pack spheres into a cylinder. From the article: "One day, physicist Ho-Kei Chan of Trinity College Dublin was playing with steel ball ...

superglaze writes "Having got BT, one of the biggest ISPs in the UK, to block the Newzbin2 Usenet site, the Motion Picture Association is now trying to get the same result from all the other major ser...

An anonymous reader writes "In a statement of policy on Tuesday, the White House announced that President Obama will veto upcoming legislation that would undermine the FCC's net neutrality rules. Acco...

Meshach writes "There's an interesting story at the WSJ about how Barnes & Noble lobbied the Justice Department to open a new antitrust probe against Microsoft regarding their abuse of the patent ...

Activision released the latest iteration of their blockbuster first-person shooter franchise yesterday, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, narrowly avoiding a whole year-long gap between this one and the...

An anonymous reader writes with news that Russia's Phobos-Grunt spacecraft has launched, taking the first step on its mission to travel to Phobos, the larger of Mars' two moons. When (and if — s...

hessian writes with this quote from the Electronic Frontier Foundation about the Stop Online Piracy Act:"Of course the word 'blacklist' does not appear in the bill's text — the folks who wrote i...

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from an AP report:"'Sprinkling' sounds like a fairly harmless practice, but in the hands of sophisticated counterfeiters it could deceive a major weapons manufac...

Brad1138 writes "You see complaints about the 'next gen' GUI's all over the place, but do we really all hate them? Personally, I don't like them — I tried very hard to like Unity in Ubuntu 11.04...

MrSeb writes "Long before Facebook and Twitpic, photos were shared by simply handing someone a print. No camera made this easier than the once-ubiquitous Polaroid. Nothing represented instant gratific...

InfiniteZero writes with this quote from MSNBC:"Einstein once said, 'A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so.' That peak age has shifted consi...

Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that a technical glitch allowed reporters to listen in on a private conversation between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and US President Barack Obama, made in a back...

itwbennett writes "The Banshee music application, and Mono, the open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework, on which Banshee is dependent, may be excluded from the next release of Ubuntu...

An anonymous reader writes "Honda has just unveiled a new, upgraded version of its famous humanoid robot, Asimo. Its appearance didn't change much, but the new robot is lighter, faster, and stronger. ...

Rambo Tribble writes "Reuters reports HP is seeking to sell WebOS, at the bidding of its financial advisers. Sounds like open sourcing it is off the table. From the article: 'HP is trying to figure ou...

Today Mozilla announced the launch of Firefox 8.0. The headline features this time around include adding Twitter as a search bar option, tab loading tweaks, and the default disabling of addons install...

kodiaktau writes "Computer scientist Landon Cox and students at Duke University are working in conjunction with researchers at Microsoft and Technicolor Research to design and develop image analysis t...

jcombel writes with this excerpt:"As the Supreme Court gets ready to hear oral arguments in a case Tuesday that could determine if authorities can track U.S. citizens with GPS vehicle trackers without...

Soon the loud passenger who's had too much to drink on your red-eye flight will be the least of your travel worries. Ryanair Airlines chief Michael O'Leary plans to launch an app that will allow passe...

LoLobey writes "Dilbert creator Scott Adams is proposing a fourth branch of government in the WSJ. He describes it as 'smallish and economical, operating independently, with a mission to build and mai...

thecarchik writes "Earlier this year at the official launch of the 2012 Model S Sedan, Musk said that Tesla was planning on installing ultra-rapid charging stations along major arterial freeways such ...

Agit-prop? Absurdist pranksterism? Unsubtly subversive PowerPoint-based performance art? Yes, Yes, and Yes. Specifically, The Yes Men, whose brand of straight-faced media manipulation has raised eyebr...

CptnHarlock writes "Today the registered users of Answers.com received an email informing them that the site has ended support for Yahoo, Twitter, Google, or LinkedIn as a way to sign into their site....

courteaudotbiz writes "For years, a business named Compu-Finder has been sending spam all around the province of Quebec, Canada. In their emails, there is a phone number where we can reach them, and a...

msmoriarty writes "Following up on its May announcement, IBM has now confirmed that by December 16 it will support Microsoft Windows on zEnterprise via its zBX component." Read more of this st...

An anonymous reader writes "It seems that there are the first fake Raspberry-Pi sites out there: 'It's just been drawn to our attention that there's a Russian site (www.raspberrypi.ru) purporting to b...

astroengine writes "Wider than an aircraft carrier and darker than coal, asteroid 2005 YU55 is soaring at over 11 miles a second straight towards Earth and moon on its latest path through the inner so...

snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia wonders why more folks aren't using FreeBSD on the desktop. 'There used to be a saying — at least I've said it many times — that my workstations run ...

First time accepted submitter wanzeo writes "With the current G-20 summit dominated by global financial uncertainty, previously unsuccessful tax strategies are getting new attention. In a short interv...

hessian writes with an article in Wired about the problems facing the U.S. Government's network in an increasingly hostile world. From the article: "The Pentagon's far-out research agency and its bran...

sciencehabit writes with an excerpt from Science: "About 25,000 years ago, humans began painting a curious creature on the walls of European caves. Among the rhinos, wild cattle, and other animals, th...

First time accepted submitter spuguli writes with more exploits of Anonymous. "From Helsingin Sanomat: 'A data leak was uncovered in Finland on Saturday, in which personal details ... of around 16,000...

With his first accepted submission, billakay writes "A recently open-sourced experimental Linux infrastructure created by Bell Labs researchers allows 3D rendering to be performed on a GPU and display...

phaedrus5001 writes with an excerpt from an Ars Technica article: "Researchers have demonstrated a vulnerability in the computer systems used to control facilities at federal prisons that could allow ...

Layzej writes "The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record in 2010, the U.S. Department of Energy calculated. A chart accompanying the study shows the brea...

maccallr writes "The Occupy movement is getting everyone talking about how to fix the world's economic (and social, environmental, ...) problems. It is even trialling new forms of 'open' democracy. Tr...

itwbennett writes "Open source is about more than code: It's also about tractors, prosthetics, Christmas lights, and the poor old U.S. Postal Service. If you don't believe that open source changes eve...

An anonymous reader writes "Over a third of undergraduate students admitted to some form of cheating at one of America's top research universities, according to a survey published November in the jour...

wiredmikey writes "Millions of people in Brazil have potentially been exposed to malware, as a result of a nationwide DNS attack. Additionally, several organizations in Brazil are reporting that netwo...

judgecorp writes "A tool to unlock (or 'jailbreak' if you like) Windows Phone devices is now available with Microsoft's blessing. ChevronWP7 Labs was withdrawn at Microsoft's request a year ago, but i...

Sparrowvsrevolution writes "At the SysCan conference in Taiwan next week, Charlie Miller plans to present a method that exploits a flaw in Apple's restrictions on code signing on iOS devices, the secu...

esocid writes with this excerpt from TorrentFreak:"Despite having booked and paid for their booth at Gamex, Sweden's largest gaming exhibition, the Pirate Party have been excluded from the action this...

For the next year, it will be hard to escape the political season already in full swing in the U.S., as candidates aim for the American presidency (and many other elected positions). There will be ple...

karthikmns writes with news that Google is rolling out Google+ Pages, integrating businesses and brands into its social network. When Google+ launched, it asked businesses not to create user...

New submitter phyzz writes "The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program aimed to replace several aircraft from three major military services with a fifth-generation model capable of short-takeoff and vertic...

After his amateur rocket flight in the desert (to 121,000 feet!), you asked rocket enthusiast Derek Deville about the project. Derek's responded to a selection of the best of those questions; read on ...

jfruhlinger writes "It looks like there's competition in the low-cost media tablet space — and that Barnes & Noble is determined not to go the way of Borders. Barnes & Noble today announ...

Zothecula writes "As is so often the case these days for those searching for a better way to stick stuff together, researchers from the Zoological Institute at the University of Kiel in Germany have t...

eldavojohn writes "A report form China's Environmental Ministry reveals that one tenth of China's 1.22 million square kilometers of farmland are polluted with heavy metals and other toxins. The AFP li...

An anonymous reader writes "The White House has responded to two more We the People petitions. These new inquiries ask the government to acknowledge formally that aliens have visited Earth. The respon...

Hugh Pickens writes "James Fallows writes tongue in cheek that U.S. Department of Fear, led by Secretary of Fear Malcolm P. Stag III, is running a poll. What should we re-name the Department of Homela...

the simurgh writes "The DMCA is just not providing the kind of protection against online piracy that Congress intended, RIAA lawyer Jennifer Pariser says. The judge in Universal Music Group's copyrigh...

MrSeb writes "With a slightly weird world first, scientists have formed a feedback loop between common, baking and brewing yeast, and a computer. The computer can trigger the yeast to produce a protei...

dartttt writes "Linux Mint 12 'Lisa' will come with its own customized desktop and it will be based on Gnome 3. The core desktop will be based on a series of Gnome Shell extensions called 'MGSE' (Mint...

An anonymous reader writes "A regional court has temporarily banned Apple from marketing or supplying iPhones and iPads in Germany, following a suit brought about by Motorola. However, Apple said that...

Ars Technica has a piece on the "first-ever nationwide test of the Emergency Alert System (EAS)," slated for this Wednesday at 2 p.m. EST. An excerpt:"This national system will look and sound much lik...

First time accepted submitter A12m0v writes with a link to Fujitsu's announcement of its next generation of supercomputer, from which he pastes: "PRIMEHPC FX10 runs on the newly-developed SPARC64 IXfx...

A few weeks ago, Robert X. Cringely revealed that a long-lost, hour-long interview he conducted of Steve Jobs in 1995 had been found. Now, it seems the lost tape has found its calling: the movies. Say...

schliz writes "Alcatel-Lucent's research arm, Bell Labs, is building low-cost robots that represent remote participants in meeting rooms. Researchers hope it will address the issue of the natural, non...

The San Francisco Chronicle features an interview with Google's patent counsel, Tim Porter, who argues that "... what many people can agree on is the current system is broken and there are a large num...

wiredmikey writes "A compromised server at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has been identified as being used as a vulnerability scanner and attack tool, probing the Web for unprotected...

First time accepted submitter Gortu writes "We are describing and demonstrating a 3D Volumetric Projector (YouTube video); in short words: a device that enables mixed reality. The 3D projector has ver...

Trailrunner7 writes "Apple's vice president of global security has reportedly stepped down, roughly two months after the surfacing of news reports that an iPhone prototype had gone missing for the sec...

MojoKid writes "Mozilla has been experimenting with an interesting idea called Boot 2 Gecko. Essentially, B2G (as it's called) is a mobile operating system based on the Web, as opposed to what the pro...

An anonymous reader writes "The GNOME 3.0 Shell with the Mutter window manager no longer requires GPU acceleration to work, while still retaining the compositing window manager and OpenGL support. GNO...

An anonymous reader writes "One cool feature I used on KMail years ago was the ability to generate a spoofed email bounce for any given message I had received, which claimed delivery failed because of...

Hugh Pickens writes "Christopher Drew writes that President Obama and industry groups have called on colleges to graduate 10,000 more engineers a year and 100,000 new teachers with majors in science, ...

An anonymous reader writes "Why are Android device commercials showing giant robots and lightning bolts and not advertising features? Here is an interesting blog post of things Android device manufact...

AlexDomo writes to point out this statistical breakdown of the programming languages represented at StackOverflow. "Suprisingly, JavaScript turned out to be the most 'over-represented' language on Sta...

First time accepted submitter Wheelie_boy writes "No word yet on hell freezing over, but Oklahoma experienced a 5.6 magnitude earthquake early Sunday morning. This is the largest quake ever recorded i...

mayberry42 writes with this news snipped from Hack Education: "Khan Academy announced this morning that it has raised $5 million from the O'Sullivan Foundation (a foundation created by Irish engineer ...

First time accepted submitter jonathan1979 writes "Dutch anti-piracy authority BREIN has caused the largest European usenet provider, News-Service.com, to immediately terminate its services as they fe...

Several readers have submitted news (as covered by an AFP article carried by the Sydney Morning Herald) that a massive iceberg is forming in the Antarctic. The rift in the PIne Island Glacier "is wide...

wiredmikey writes "A new open source scanning tool has been released by engineers at independent security testing firm NSS Labs that can be used to detect Duqu drivers installed on a system. The tool ...

esocid writes with excerpts from a piece written by Ben Goldacre of The Guardian: "Baroness Susan Greenfield, Professor of pharmacology at Oxford, apparently announced that computer games are causing ...

First time accepted submitter ecorona writes "This Google Maps mashup was published in Science (paywall warning) this week. It shows genetic risk for multiple diseases distributed across the globe. It...

alphadogg writes "With all the publicity about breaches of SSL certificate authorities and a hack that exploits a vulnerability in the supposedly secure protocol, it's time to consider something else ...

deadeyefred writes "Dropbox last month launched its Teams service, targeted at small and mid-sized businesses — but acknowledges it's not PCI-, HIPAA- or Sarbanes-Oxley compliant. Company execut...

First time accepted submitter ronaldm writes "As a composer who uses computers for anything and everything from engraving to live performance projects, it's periodically of some concern that computers...

theodp writes "Federal prosecutors will not charge a Texas judge seen lashing his teenage daughter with a belt on a YouTube video taken seven years ago and posted online last week, closing the door on...

coondoggie writes "The Japanese supercomputer ranked #1 on the Top 500 fastest supercomputers broke its own record this week by hitting 10 quadrillion calculations per second (10.51 petaflops), accord...

antdude points out this article at opensource.com on the "graveyard" of digital rights management schemes — the death of each of which has left customers out in the cold. An excerpt: "There are ...

An anonymous reader writes "Eclipse has launched a website for a new JVM language, called Xtend. It's built with Eclipse's Xtext and compiles directly to Java code, similar to what CoffeeScript does t...

hessian writes with this story in Wired: "Federal authorities used a fake Verizon cellphone tower to zero in on a suspect's wireless card, and say they were perfectly within their rights to do so, eve...

Lord Byron II writes "My grandma is in her 80s, is bed-ridden, in a nursing home, and is basically reaching the end of her life. Her legs are weak, meaning that she is confined to her bed, and her hea...

phands writes "SCO has moved to partially reopen their 10 year old lawsuit against IBM. Unbelievable! Details at Groklaw."From the article, quoting SCO's filing: "SCO respectfully requests that the Co...

DeviceGuru writes with this excerpt: "Barnes & Noble is expected to announce a 7-inch color tablet on November 7th, positioning it head-to-head with Amazon's recently announced Kindle Fire. B&...

Hugh Pickens writes "Nick Wingfield writes in the NY Times that Apple's present pricing strategy is a big change from the 1990s, when consumers regarded Apple as a producer of overpriced tech baubles,...

yuhong writes "MS has traced the Duqu zero-day to a vulnerability in font parsing in win32k. Many file formats like HTML, Office, and PDF support embedded fonts, and in NT4 and later fonts are parsed ...

First time accepted submitter mariocki writes "British music industry body BPI has requested BT block access to Pirate Bay. In response, BT say they will only do so if they receive a court order. But ...

bill_mcgonigle writes "A consortium of eighty companies and developers have developed the StreetScooter, a modular electric vehicle developed in a year using open-source methodologies. With a top spee...

gbl08ma writes "According to various sources, the ISO image size for the upcoming Long-Term Support Ubuntu version 'Precise Pangolin' will not fit on a regular CD, since the image size is expected to ...

renek writes "In one of the most brazen attacks on net neutrality to date, Verizon has announced it will offer a so called 'Turbo Boost' for smart phones that run on its wireless network. 'Verizon wil...

suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from CNN Money: "Customers are dumping their banks in droves ahead of the nationwide 'Move Your Money' and 'Bank Transfer Day' movements this Saturday. Given the rec...

MojoKid writes "AMD's initial layoff announcement yesterday implied that the dismissals would occur across the company's global sales force. While that may still be true, it has become clear that AMD ...

gManZboy writes "Babies, athletes, first responders, the elderly — a growing list of people could benefit from connected clothing, says AT&T, which claims 'the stars have aligned' for this t...

jd writes "There are many pieces of software out there, such as seL4 (kindly brought to my attention by another reader), where the vendor has indeed engineered something that they're entitled to Close...

dotarray writes "Despite stories suggesting that a change to the Australian ratings system may be as far as two years away, the Federal Minister for Home Affairs has announced that each Australian sta...

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from the HST site:"A team of scientists has used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to observe a quasar accretion disc — a brightly glowing disc of matter...

gary.flake writes "'Scott Rickard set out to do what no musician has ever tried — to make the world's ugliest piece of music [video]. At TEDxMIA, he discusses the math and science behind creatin...

brothke writes:"The book Digital Assassination: Protecting Your Reputation, Brand, or Business Against Online Attacks says businesses that take days to respond to social media issues are way behind th...

hazytodd writes "Repairs to Android smartphones cost wireless carriers $2 billion per year according to a new year-long WDS study that tracked 600,000 support calls around the globe. Android's popular...

think_nix writes "After the resignation of Apache from the Java SE/EE Executive Committee, the time has now come for Harmony to be added to the Apache Attic. Harmony was 'the project to produce an ope...

waderoush writes "First-generation search engines such as AltaVista — built when the Web had only a few hundred thousand sites — produced notoriously goofy and spam-prone results. Well, wh...

New submitter Lashat writes "According to Ars Technica, 'A new survey seems to show that VMware's iron grip on the enterprise virtualization market is loosening, with 38 percent of businesses planning...

chrb writes "A recent article at Bloomberg discusses Western companies supplying monitoring equipment to Iran. There are few regulations restricting the sale of intelligence monitoring systems to the ...

Orome1 writes "Microsoft, Mozilla and Google have announced that they are revoking trust in Malaysia-based DigiCert, an intermediate certificate authority authorized by well-known CA Entrust, followin...

jfruhlinger writes "In a world where 'app' is the new buzzword, the development of native Linux apps is lagging. Some of this can be attributed to the usual community infighting (the latest version of...

mikejuk writes "French computer scientists have finally proved that sorting pancakes is hard — NP hard. No really — this isn't a joke. Well, it is slightly amusing but that's just because ...

bsquizzato writes "The Associated Press is running a story about the CIA's Open Source Center: 'a team known affectionately as the "vengeful librarians,"' who work out of 'an anonymous industrial park...

On June 3, 2010, a team of six volunteers began the Mars500 experiment: they were locked into a cluster of hermetically sealed habitat modules for the duration of a simulated mission to Mars lasting 5...

alphadogg writes "On December 1, AOL will shut down its free LISTSERV-based mailing-list hosting operations, the company has told mailing list administrators. 'If your list is still actively used, ple...

SharkLaser writes "As Bing gets closer to capturing almost 33% of the market share in the US, Google has again made a large tweak to its algorithms to provide more up-to-the-minute search results. The...

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft is proud to announce that mobile usage of its Hotmail service has exploded in the past few weeks, and guess who is to thank? Apple! More than 2 million Apple user...

pmontra writes "A Spanish company has won a legal case against Apple and will be able to sell an Android tablet that Apple had claimed infringes on the iPad patent. It is now seeking damages from Appl...

schwit1 writes "The Department of Justice has canceled a controversial revision to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) rules that opponents said would have allowed federal agencies to lie about the exis...

astroengine writes "Those pesky physicists are at it again; they want to build a laser so powerful that it will literally rip spacetime apart. Why? To prove the existence of virtual particles in the q...

sciencehabit writes "Researchers have discovered the fossil remains of a 94-million-year-old squirrel-like critter with a long, narrow snout and a pair of curved saber-fangs that it would have likely ...

coondoggie writes "While conventional wisdom says virtualized environments and public clouds create massive security headaches, the godfather of Xen, Simon Crosb, says virtualization actually holds a ...

Luyseyal writes "Advanced Micro Devices Inc. slashed its global employment by 1,400 jobs Thursday as the company seeks to boost profits and re-balance its work force to pursue new product areas. This ...

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister discusses the use of quizzes and brain-teasers in evaluating potential software development hires, a practice that seems to be on the rise. 'The compan...

itwbennett writes "In today's edition of David v. Goliath, Apple lawyers have sent cease and desist letters to a tiny health food restaurant in Luxembourg named AppleADay. For their part, the owners o...

gManZboy writes "The space agency is widely known as a cloud computing success story in the government for its Nebula cloud computing platform. Now NASA will develop an app store for its scientists. T...

First time accepted submitter folsomfella writes "The 11th annual survey spotlights the municipalities that best show how information and communication technology are used to enhance public service. T...

bdking writes "After more than two weeks of complaints from frustrated iPhone 4S owners, Apple finally has admitted problems with fast-draining batteries in the new devices. The company blames it on b...

First time accepted submitter redletterdave writes "After being introduced in September, HP's new CEO Meg Whitman announced Oct. 27 that the company 'needs to be in the tablet business.' However, by c...

MrSeb writes "China has joined two space vehicles together in orbit for the first time. The unmanned Shenzhou 8 craft, launched earlier this week, made contact with the Tiangong-1 space lab at 1729 GM...

astroengine writes "On Saturday, Oct. 29 at 5:04 a.m. EDT, a Progress Cargo Module undocked from the ISS and drifted away with a full haul of space station trash. It gradually slowed, deorbiting and d...

Kyusaku Natsume writes "Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Wednesday that some of the melted fuel in reactor 2 at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant may have triggered a brief criticality event. Tsuyoshi Mi...

wjousts writes "A interesting take on the birth of the Xbox from Technology Review: 'When the original Xbox video-game console went on sale in 2001, it wasn't clear why Microsoft, known for staid work...

mario_grgic writes "And so it begins: Apple will require that all Mac apps submitted to the Mac App store stick to strict sandboxing requirements. This means you must ask Apple for read or read/write ...

BuzzSkyline writes "According to a post at Physics Buzz, 'Just weeks after speeding neutrinos seem to have broken the speed of light, another universal law, the fine structure constant might be about ...

Tasha26 writes "A trainee surgeon, Mark Frame, has figured out how to save U.K.'s NHS thousands of pounds by taking advantage of 3D-printer technology. Success in orthopedic operations relies on surge...

Stirling Newberry writes "Non-conventional extraction of hydrocarbons is the next wave of production, including natural gas and oil – at least according to its advocates. One of the most controv...

An anonymous reader writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon is starting a program to lend ebooks to Kindle users. It will allow users to borrow just one title at a time, but readers will b...

An anonymous reader writes "Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen thinks scientists and engineers could be more likely to have a child with autism, an idea that is fairly common currency in Silicon Valley. B...

sl4shd0rk writes "Nicholas Negroponte and the OLPC project are still going and have a new plan in the works: a laptop air-drop to help facilitate 'self-education' in areas with large poor populations....

Hugh Pickens writes "Gary Morgenthaler, a recognized expert in artificial intelligence and a Siri board member, says that Apple now has at least a two-year advantage over Google in the war for best sm...

RedEaredSlider writes "A group of researchers in Canada has decided to combine the mechanism geckos use to stick to walls with the simplicity of a tank tread. The result is a 'bot that can roll up smo...

kodiaktau writes "Dr. Szabolcs Marka has received one of five $1M grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to continue his experiments with using light beams to create mosquito barriers. T...

First time accepted submitter tkel writes "On October 12, 2011 Theologian John Haught publicly debated prominent evolutionary scientist and atheist Jerry Coyne at the University of Kentucky. Although ...

coondoggie writes "NASA issued a study today that said if life ever existed on Mars, the longest lasting environments were most likely below the planet's surface. The hypothesis comes from analyzing t...

First time accepted submitter Bucky24 writes "ZDNet's Ed Bott decided to contact major PC makers to find out the truth about Windows 8 SecureBoot. The responses are encouraging for those of us who run...

First time accepted submitter TheNextCorner writes "NASA scientists will be tracking asteroid 2005 YU55 with antennas of the agency's Deep Space Network at Goldstone, Calif., as the space rock safely ...

snydeq writes "Advice Line's Bob Lewis discusses the difficulties IT faces in embracing the kinds of consumer technologies business users are demanding they support. 'Let's assume the consumerization ...

jfruhlinger writes "Even Linux's most passionate partisans will admit that its filesystem, which stashes vital files in a variety of arcane directories, can be baffling to users. The developers at the...

sciencehabit writes "Last year, Jeffrey Aristoff and Howard Stone, mechanical engineers at Princeton University, were at the gym waiting for a pickup game of basketball. To warm up, Stone started jump...

MrSeb writes "When the Microsoft-Nokia strategic alliance was first announced in February, there was absolutely no mention of money: Nokia, seemingly on its own accord, had decided that Windows Phone ...

quanticle writes "20 years ago today, Bram Moolenaar released vim to the public. From the article:'The Vim text editor was first released to the public on November 2, 1991—exactly 20 years ago t...

olsmeister writes "Google removed their new GMail app from the App Store due to a programming error that caused an error message related to the aps-environment entitlement string when the app was star...

jonklinger writes "An Israeli Court rejected the appeal of a prisoner who requested to have an Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 because there is no possibility to remove the internet connectivity apparatus f...

richi writes "It looks like Carbonite, Inc. has been giving out customers' personal information. The company's admitted giving customer email address to a third party, in direct contravention of its p...

bdking writes "The most popular mobile game in history now has been downloaded more than 500,000,000 times, according to maker Rovio Mobile. Good thing the 300 million minutes of Angry Birds daily pla...

Zothecula writes "Nuclear power plants are located close to sources of water, which is used as a coolant to handle the waste heat discharged by the plants. This means that water contaminated with radi...

msmoriarty writes "10 years ago this month, IBM open sourced an internal project focused on creating a common component framework for developers: Eclipse. In an interview with ADTmag.com, Eclipse Foun...

First time accepted submitter Z_God writes "Disappointed with KDE 4's performance and other shortcomings, Timothy Pearson continued KDE 3.5 development under the name Trinity. Tuesday the first major ...

First time accepted submitter SharkLaser writes "Users of Facebook Connect have previously enjoyed extra privacy as it was harder for Google to index comments made on the platform. Google, which also ...

An anonymous reader writes "Fast Company takes a look at the Apple App Store and concludes that it's a casino where most developers are making tragic losses and a tiny few are striking it filthy rich....

An anonymous reader writes "A tweet appeared from Raspberry Pi stating the launch of the $25 wasn't happening in November as expected. So I decided to investigate further and contacted Raspberry Pi to...

PolygamousRanchKid writes in with this quote from CNN: "Libya's transitional government picked an engineering professor and longtime exile as its acting prime minister Monday, with the new leader pled...

An anonymous reader writes "Troubled times ahead for Righthaven as Ars Technica reports that the US Marshals have been instructed 'to use "reasonable force" to seize $63,720.80 in cash and/or assets f...

Trailrunner7 writes with an excerpt from Threatpost: "A newly discovered installer for the Duqu malware includes an exploit for a previously unknown vulnerability in the Windows kernel that allows rem...

Attila Dimedici writes "A professor at Tilburg University has been caught using fake data in over 30 scientific papers. Diederik Stapel's latest paper claimed that eating meat made people anto-social ...

UnknowingFool writes "When the Courier project was leaked out, it was a bold look at how MS would design new tablets. Microsoft was currently selling tablets but they didn't make a dent in the market....

In their first story, slowLearner writes "India will build a working Thorium reactor. [Quoting the Guardian] 'Officials are currently selecting a site for the reactor, which would be the first of its ...

judgecorp writes "Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, has lost his appeal in the British High Court against extradition to Sweden on charges of rape. His team has 14 days to appeal to the Supreme Co...

OverTheGeicoE writes "ProPublica has a story on how x-ray scanners became the controversial yet mandatory security fixtures we in the US must now endure. The story title, 'U.S. Government Glossed Over...

sammcj writes with news that HP is developing servers based on 32-bit ARM processors from Calxeda. Their current model is only a test setup, but they plan to roll out a finalized design by the middle ...

An anonymous reader writes "Why are there so many free games listed in the top 10 grossing games over in Apple's App Store? Because some feature exorbitant in-app purchase fees for virtual items. Quot...

RockDoctor writes "Theologian John Haught publicly debated prominent evolutionary scientist and atheist Jerry Coyne at the University of Kentucky back in October. Before the debate, both parties agree...

Master Moose writes "New Zealand's largest ISPs confirmed yesterday that they had received their first notices under the government's new copyright regime, which came into effect on September 1. All t...

AmiMoJo writes "Belgium's political parties have reached a conditional agreement to shut down the country's two remaining nuclear power stations. Older reactors will be decommissioned by 2015, with th...

blackbearnh writes "For many adults into technology, childhood was an alienating experience, pigeon-holed as a nerd and relegated to the A/V, Computer or Gaming club in high school. But according to a...

New submitter trunicated writes "Everyone on Slashdot seems to know about PROTECT-IP Act — how it will push responsibility for the contents of the internet onto the search engines that index it,...

An anonymous reader writes "In a paper to be published in the journal Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, researchers detail an algorithm they have developed to dramatically speed up the process of produc...

An anonymous reader writes "In recent times, the world's supply of rare-earth minerals has suffered from both increased demand, due to their use in modern technological devices, and uncertain supply, ...

An anonymous reader writes "A new paper argues that China's cyber-warfare capability is actually pretty poor. '[China has] evinced little proficiency with more sophisticated hacking techniques. The vi...

intellitech sends this quote from a NASA news release:"Tractor beams — the ability to trap and move objects using light — are the stuff of science fiction, but a team of NASA scientists ha...

gzipped_tar writes "The U.S. withdrew funding after the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's Palestine membership vote yesterday. The decision was triggered by a 1994 US ...

snydeq writes "Anonymous supporters have backed off threats to expose Zeta drug gang collaborators, an operation launched in early October as a retaliation for an alleged kidnapping of an Anonymous fo...

An anonymous reader writes "In the first few days of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, no one outside the power station knew what the hell was happening. In the 9 months since, information has c...

New submitter obliv!on writes "As previously discussed, the White House has started to reply to petitions on their 'We the People' website. They've now replied to the petition asking for an end to sof...

The Impossible Project, first mentioned here in 2009, has a goal that might be quixotic, but (despite the name) is looking ever more possible, after all: to bring back film for the millions of Polaroi...

THE_WELL_HUNG_OYSTER writes "My tech-savvy father died suddenly and unexpectedly. He did everything online: bill-pay, banking, eBay sales (and other auction sites), PayPal, investing, etc. When he die...

garymortimer writes "A German team has managed to fly its super-sized hobby inspired platform with a man on-board! A one-hour flight would cost something near to 6 Euro for electricity. In addition, t...

First time accepted submitter tearmeapart writes "A new version of the operating system that most of us would love to love, but probably hardly ever directly use, has been released. As scheduled, rele...

Orome1 writes "Nearly 50 (and quite possibly more) companies in the chemical, defense, and other sectors have been hit with a spear phishing campaign carrying a backdoor Trojan with the ultimate goal ...

OverTheGeicoE writes "On Saturday, the Electronic Privacy Information Center announced that they filed papers in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit to get the Department of Homeland Security...

RdeCourtney writes "The BBC is reporting that from 1 January 2012, Google will charge for the Google Maps API service when more than the limit of 25,000 map "hits" are made in a day. Google is rumoure...

theodp writes "James Hague has compiled a short list of things that the circa-1986 Turbo Pascal 3 for MS-DOS is smaller than (chart). For starters, at 39,731 bytes, the entire Turbo Pascal 3.02 execut...

First time accepted submitter gmikeska07 writes "I have no computer science degree, but I took a Java class in college and greatly enjoyed it. I have some experience with Javascript and have done some...

An anonymous reader writes "Two recent papers, one from Microsoft Research and one from University of Wisconsin (PDF), are providing a refreshing take on rethinking 'what a file is.' This could have m...

The hard drive crunch continues; reader Thorfinn.au writes "ASUS has said it only has hard disk drive (HDD) inventory until the end of November. 'Substitutes for HDD are very few, so if the situation ...

An anonymous reader writes "It doesn't matter whether a true invention is implemented in hardware or software, it should still be patentable, argues Marty Goetz — the man who was granted the fir...

wiredmikey writes "Is RIM's centralized network model broken? Andrew Jaquith thinks so, and provides an interesting analysis on why RIM should move to a decentralized model. After two long outages thi...

sTeF writes "Laquadrature du Net releases 3 videos on ACTA: Every citizen can help defeat ACTA by spreading this video across the Internet, urging their fellow citizens to mobilize, and contacting the...

angry tapir writes about an interesting use for malware. From the Techworld article: "A newly identified Mac OS X Trojan bundles a component that leverages the processing power of video cards to gener...

Dishwasha writes "For over a decade I have had arrays of 10-20 disks providing larger than normal storage at home. I have suffered twice through complete loss of data once due to accidentally not re-e...

darthcamaro writes "There are a lot of us that really don't like Unity. Ubuntu Founder Mark Shuttleworth defended Unity today, arguing that even 'cool' power users should like usability and ease of us...

An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from an article in BGR: "Samsung blew past Apple and Nokia in the third quarter to become the No. 1 smartphone vendor in the world, but another emerging smar...

Bruce Perens writes "Open Hardware Journal is a new technical journal on designs for physical or electronic objects that are shared as if they were Open Source software. It's an open journal under a C...

eldavojohn writes "Wuhan University researchers working with the National Research Council of Canada and the Center for Functional Genomics at the University at Albany announced that they have genetic...

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has announced that its Kinect motion-control system will be available for PCs in early 2012, and that they're planning to take it into the business world as well....

theodp writes "Google co-founder Sergey Brin recently revealed that he is now leading Google's efforts to ready a driverless car for the consumer market, but one big, publicly-unanswered question is: ...

An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports that Minecraft has won a new arts award for games, beating the likes of Portal 2 and Ilomilo. The prize was announced at the finale of the GameCity videogam...

Trailrunner7 writes "Microsoft Research has proposed mitigation for a known potential attack against verifiable electronic voting machines that could help prevent insiders from being able to alter vot...

aneroid writes "The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has certified its first secure mobile device running Android 2.2 — the Dell Streak 5. It is certified for use in the Defense Departm...

sciencehabit writes "Some sounds are excruciating. Take fingernails squeaking on a chalkboard. The noise makes many people shudder, but researchers never knew exactly why. A new study finds that there...

An anonymous reader writes "IEEE reports that Boston Dynamics has unveiled video footage showing its biped humanoid robot PETMAN walking, kneeling, and doing push-ups. Boston Dynamics is building the ...

mrquagmire writes with this excerpt from Engadget:"Go easy on the gas, Speed Racer, because Cordon is on its way. Developed by Simicon, this new speed sensor promises to take highway surveillance to n...

uncleO writes "An article in the NY Times describes two studies that weigh the harm caused by cancer screenings against the benefits they provide. From the article, 'Two recent clinical trials of pros...

A military research facility outside Boston has come up two new super foods for MREs (Meal, Ready to Eat). Soon soldiers will able to stay awake during guard duty thanks to caffeinated meat sticks. Th...

Earlier this month you got a chance to ask They Might Be Giants about DIY albums, nerd culture, and science songs. Below you'll find their responses. Thanks to the band for taking time to answer quest...

Zothecula writes "The future of the International Space Station (ISS) became more secure on Sunday, October 30, 2011 when the Russian space agency Rosocosmos carried out a successful launch of an unma...

MrSeb writes "Drawing yet another battle line between the incumbent oligarchs of the West and the developing hordes of the East, China has unveiled a new supercomputer that uses entirely-homegrown pro...

ideonexus writes "Last month an article appeared on Slashdot about how the Government pays IT contractors twice what it pays its own workers. Missing from the article was how much the IT Contractor pa...

First time accepted submitter GuerillaRadio writes "Mark Shuttleworth is to announce that Canonical will be taking Ubuntu Linux to smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in...

wiredmikey writes "In Mumbai, Indian authorities seized components from servers in a data center after Symantec informed them that they were communicating with the command and control (C&C) infras...

Irishman writes "A leading climate change skeptic, Richard Muller, will release results today showing that global warming is indeed happening. He has shown that two items skeptics look to, urban heat ...

Irishman writes "A leading climate change skeptic, Richard Muller, will release results today showing that global warming is indeed happening. He has shown that two items skeptics look to, urban heat ...

cylonlover writes "Detecting explosives is a vital task both on the battlefield and off, but it requires equipment that, if sensitive enough to detect explosives traces in small quantities, is often e...

derGoldstein writes "Ars has an article up about the two latest 'papers demonstrating that, if you change the way the graphene stacks, you obtain a voltage-controlled bandgap ... Between these two pap...

digitig writes "UK Metropolitan Police have purchased a 'covert surveillance technology that can masquerade as a mobile phone network, transmitting a signal that allows authorities to shut off phones ...

whoever57 writes "According to Prof Kubiatowicz from Berkeley, each time an additional book is downloaded to an e-reader, the mass of the e-reader increases. The effect doesn't really make the devices...

First time accepted submitter Nysul writes "The White House, aiming to gather the opinion (or marketing data) of the internet nation, asked for our thoughts by creating the We the People site and now ...

PolygamousRanchKid writes "In late 1965, President Lyndon Johnson stood in the modest gymnasium of what had once been the tiny teaching college he attended and announced a program to promote education...

Diggester writes "Unless their chipset has already been exploited and jailbroken on a previous device, it takes a lot of time for the iOS jailbreaking community to come with a jailbreak for a new iOS ...