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A study by French research organization Exodus Privacy and Yale University's Privacy Lab analyzed the mobile apps for the signatures of 25 known trackers and found that more than three in four Android apps contain at least one third-party "tracker." The Guardian reports: Among the apps found to be using some sort of tracking plugin were some of the most popular apps on the Google Play Store, including Tinder, Spotify, Uber and OKCupid. All four apps use a service owned by Google, called Crashlytics, that primarily tracks app crash reports, but can also provide the ability to "get insight into your users, what they're doing, and inject live social content to delight them." Other less widely-used trackers can go much further. One cited by Yale is FidZup, a French tracking provider with technology that can "detect the presence of mobile phones and therefore their owners" using ultrasonic tones. FidZup says it no-longer uses that technology, however, since tracking users through simple wifi networks works just as well.

Gunkerty Jeb writes "Researchers working on the 'physically unclonable functions found in standard PC components (PUFFIN) project' announced last week that widely used graphics processors could be the next step in online authentication. The project seeks to find uniquely identifiable characteristics of hardware in common computers, mobile devices, laptops and consumer electronics. The researchers realized that apparently identical graphics processors are actually different in subtle, unforgeable ways. A piece of software developed by the researchers is capable of discerning these fine differences. The order of magnitude of these differences is so minute, in fact, that manufacturing equipment is incapable of manipulating or replicating them. Thus, the fine-grained manufacturing differences can act as a sort of a key to reliably distinguish each of the processors from one another. The implication of this discovery is that such differences can be used as physically unclonable features to securely link the graphics cards, and by extension, the computers in which they reside and the persons using them, to specific online accounts."

wanted writes "If you look at Microsoft's Poland business solutions Web site, you will probably not notice anything odd about the main picture. However, when you compare it with the original English version, you can see that someone decided that showing black people in Poland is probably not going to be convincing to business. They just Photoshopped the head of a white guy in for the black one, in an amateurish way, leaving his hand unchanged. (Here's a mirror in case something should happen to the original.)" We noted a few months back that the city of Toronto had done something similar.

Teksty Piosenek writes "Artists and record bosses believe that the best album is the loudest one. Sound levels are being artificially enhanced so that the music punches through when it competes against background noise in pubs or cars. 'Geoff Emerick, engineer on the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album, said: "A lot of what is released today is basically a scrunched-up mess. Whole layers of sound are missing. It is because record companies don't trust the listener to decide themselves if they want to turn the volume up." Downloading has exacerbated the effect. Songs are compressed once again into digital files before being sold on iTunes and similar sites. The reduction in quality is so marked that EMI has introduced higher-quality digital tracks, albeit at a premium price, in response to consumer demand.'"

Boudewijn Rempt writes "Amazon's recommendation system recommended me "Open Source Game Development: Qt Games for KDE, PDA's and Windows" when I was looking for an introduction to OpenGL. While it does contain two chapters on OpenGL, there's much, much more. It's not just an introduction to writing open source games, it's a complete introduction to participating in open source projects like KDE." Read the rest of Boudewijn's review. Open Source Game Development: Qt Games for KDE, PDAs and Windows author Martin Heni, Andreas Beckermann pages 554 publisher Charles River Media rating 8 reviewer Boudewijn Rempt ISBN 1-58450-406-4 summary Complete guide on writing small to medium games for Linux, Windows and PDA's using Qt.

As maintainer of Krita, the KOffice paint application, I need to know about graphics. Unfortunately, the four months of retraining from sinologist to Oracle Forms developer that launched me into a life of coding didn't include anything on graphics, and certainly not on OpenGL. Which is very much where Krita 2.0 is going.

So... I was looking for an easy introduction to OpenGL to kind of ease my way into the Red and Orange books. And Amazon's weird recommendations system recommended Open Source Game Development: Qt Games for KDE, PDAs, and Windows by Martin Heni and Andreas Beckermann to me. Intrigued, I ordered the volume forthwith. Turns out that that was a good move: this is an excellent book.

In the first place, the text is very clear and concise, but never dry. Forget about the ho-ho-I'm-funny chatty style that's prevalent in many technical books. This book comes to the point immediately. Then, the information is carefully ordered and the presentation very neat and clear. Those would be good points for any book.

But what makes Open Source Game Development: Qt Games for KDE, PDAs, and Windows even more interesting is that it's much more than its title indicates. It is squarely intended at the hobby coder who wants to work on what the book calls "desktop games" -- not the multi-million dollar multimedia productions that demand a new graphics card every half year, but the games that you play while thinking out a knotty problem or that have some educational value for your kids. The kind of project a single coder, or a small team can complete and maintain while still staying sane. And, of course, that kind of game, defender or zaxxon-type games, maze games or tetris-style games work are perfectly suited for pda's and mobile phones, too,

Actually, this book is the perfect introduction to joining a big Open Source project I've seen. Of course, the focus is on Qt and KDE, which means that if you always had this itch to join KDE development but didn't have the necessary skills, this book will help you get there in a very pleasant way.

One way this is done, is by always first giving a general introduction to a topic, and then more detailed discussion in the next chapter. So, first we've got a very good "Qt Primer", and three chapters "KDE Game Development", "Qt Game Development Using Microsoft Windows" and "Game Development and PDA's". And there's a chapter on "OpenGL" in general, and then a chapter on "OpenGL with Qt".

The first part of the book deals with this type of introductory material. The second part discusses "Artificial Intelligence", "Pathfinding" (this chapter was a revelation to me -- I never understood how that worked. If only I had this information while trying to write games for my ZX Spectrum!), "Particle Effects" and "Math and Physics in Desktop Games". The material in these chapters is foreshadowed by the very first chapter "Introduction to Desktop Gaming", which deals with game balancing, architecture and the ins and outs of developing free software. Armed with these chapters, you can add enough game play to your games to make them satisfying to play.

The next three chapters discussion the Qt network classes and how to use them in your games, the KGame library (free software, of course), that contains a lot of boring groundwork that's the same for most games -- players, input devices, network stuff. For me personally, the "XML" chapter wasn't that useful, but then, I'm a corporate cubby-hole programmer by day, and XML is my bread and butter. It's amazing how many billable hours XML can add to a business application project.

A very important chapter, "Open Source and Intellectual Property Rights" makes it very clear what's allowed and what not. The summary chapter, "A Practical Summary" is a novel idea -- at least, I hadn't come across something like this before -- and it works quite well, tying all strands together. There are plenty of references to earlier chapters, so if works like a kind of hands-on index. Not that the actual index isn't top-notch, too.

I should make clear that this book is not just about coding for KDE. That's what most interesting to me, but if you want to code a game for Windows, for a Qtopia or Qt/Embedded environment, then this is the right book. After all, with the release of Qt4 under GPL for Windows (Qt was already released under GPL for X11 and OS X, as was Qtopia), Qt is a good choice for Windows hobby programmers. You get a high quality toolkit that really helps with the boring ground work, and excellent documentation. Coupled with the clear text in this book, there's nothing to hold you back.

Andreas Beckermann is the author of Boson, an OpenGL real-time strategy game based on Qt and KDE. His experience in working on Boson really is apparent in this book. Martin Heni has written a couple of games that that are in KDE's games pack, and has won a prize for his QTopia game Zauralign.

Oh, and the chapters on OpenGL and OpenGL with Qt were enough to make me understand the OpenGL Krita already has and did prepare me quite adequately for the big Red and Orange books. And I've got the itch to write a little game now..."

You can purchase Open Source Game Development: Qt Games for KDE, PDAs and Windows from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Aleks Clark writes "The Interdictor, a DirectNIC crisis manager, is currently braving the madness of post-Katrina New Orleans. Server rescues, OC4 repairs and live video and audio feeds abound as he and his crew battle the odds with what seems like the entire internet at his back. 1700+ People are tracking his blog, and IRC channels are full to capacity."

zoobab writes "Next wednesday, on the 6th July, the European Parliament will have the last chance to prevent US-style software patents in the EU. If the Parliament fails to reach 367 votes for the key amendments, then the Council directive will legalize business methods and software patents. Yesterday, many political groups have tabled amendments to patch the Council text. A demonstration online is running with currently 2400 websites shutting down until the vote. A physical demonstration is also planned in Strasbourg on next tuesday the 5th of July."

zoobab writes "Next wednesday, on the 6th July, the European Parliament will have the last chance to prevent US-style software patents in the EU. If the Parliament fails to reach 367 votes for the key amendments, then the Council directive will legalize business methods and software patents. Yesterday, many political groups have tabled amendments to patch the Council text. A demonstration online is running with currently 2400 websites shutting down until the vote. A physical demonstration is also planned in Strasbourg on next tuesday the 5th of July."

Dark Twonky writes "Human Beans is selling the perfect gift for the geek who has everything. It's the PowerPizza, a pizza box for transporting your precious laptop in. From the web site: Desirable laptops are desirable to thieves too. Disguise your laptop with a PowerPizza and reduce the risk of getting it nicked."

An anonymous reader with a lot of time on his hands writes "As seen on Slashdot b e f o r e, the Newton refuses to die. Since Apple discontinued it, it got ATA, WiFi, Bluetooth, Zeroconf and even a NES emulator. Now, several Mac news sites r e p o r t, Newton users founded an association with John Sculley, who pushed the Newton at Apple, as its honorary president. They're organizing a conference in Paris in September. How long until all these users switch to new hardware?"

flynn_nrg writes "Scott Long, from the release engineering team, has sent this message to the freebsd-alpha mailing list:'The day has finally come to demote FreeBSD/Alpha to tier-2 status. While I'm sure that this will come as a disappointment to many, the simple truth is that there is no longer enough community interest nor developer interest to fix critical bugs and assist in the development of new features. We've struggled with this for several years, and it's time to set the proper expectations before we enter 5-STABLE.'" (Read on for the rest of the announcement.)

"Being Tier-2 does not mean that Alpha support will actively be removed from the tree. It does, however, mean that ISO images might not be produced for upcoming releases, pre-compiled packages might not be produced and more (in fact, this already stopped several weeks ago), and future security advisories might not be issued for it. This only applies to FreeBSD 5.3 and beyond; existing alpha releases are still supported by the security team according to their schedule, and future 4.x erratas and releases will still support it also. Demotion is also not a terminal condition. If in the future there is an renewed interest and the existing problems can be fixed, it can be re-considered for tier-1.

Alpha was a very important platform for FreeBSD. It paved the way both for 64-bit cleanliness and for being able to support multiple architectures. It was also a nice and refreshing architecture in a world of bland and hackish i386 systems. Thanks to Doug Rabson for porting to it in the first place and thanks to everyone who supported it afterwards.

The Release Engineering Team"

Dan writes "A few weeks ago Xavier Humbert succesfully compiled NetBSD-current on a MacOSX 10.3 with an i386 target. He has provided a summary of his crossbuild execution as well as his build script. But why bother crossbuilding ? Erik Berls's article explains the process of cross compilation on NetBSD. He says that NetBSD's crossbuild framework allows a host to build a version of NetBSD 1.6 or later regardless of the version of the host. Crossbuilding has several major benefits, if you have production servers, you can build the OS without needing to load down the machine that is actively surviving as a production host."

Dan writes "A few weeks ago Xavier Humbert succesfully compiled NetBSD-current on a MacOSX 10.3 with an i386 target. He has provided a summary of his crossbuild execution as well as his build script. But why bother crossbuilding ? Erik Berls's article explains the process of cross compilation on NetBSD. He says that NetBSD's crossbuild framework allows a host to build a version of NetBSD 1.6 or later regardless of the version of the host. Crossbuilding has several major benefits, if you have production servers, you can build the OS without needing to load down the machine that is actively surviving as a production host."

YannH writes "Docs.eu.org is a free documentation portal, trying to gather and to distribute computer science free documentation; we try to stay as open as possible on documentations we include. We gathered an amount of 500 Mo of documentation (linux, programming languages, free software philosophy, and so), some of them are standards that you can find everywhere, some other are more rarely referenced; hope this help. Enjoy :)"

freax writes "Today in the the xbox-linux mailinglist: I'm typing this into KMail using a USB keybaord (and a USB mouse) in front of the TV connected to the Xbox. ... and even StarOffice works quite fine. TuxRacer also runs (look at the new screenhots on the website), but only with one frame per second. Check out screenshots here."

Squidgee writes "This is the site for "LIAP: Linux In A Pillbox". It is an interesting recovery distro made in the vein of pharmaceuticals; each floppy based 'minidistro' cures one specific Linux ailment. Or, as Luke Komasta (The creator of LIAP) puts it: "My Linux project contains "pills". Each of them is good for one disease, but it doesn't work good enough for another. When you know what you need a Linux for, you may choose a good pill. And of course, as you know, there is no drug which is good for treating all diseases." It's an extremely interesting approach to Linux recovery, and one that appears to be more effective than the other varieties of floppy/mini-cd based recovery systems. Worth downloading in case you ever need it!"

Slashback -- another round of updates and errata for your reading pleasure follows. So read on for more information on spambots, Flash memory for your slightly-outdated Apple systems, Linux (not quite) running on the GP32, publicity (including a security problem) from Mozilla, and more.

Let's find the spamsters and turn them over to Hormel. Neil Gunton writes: "Further to my previous article about stopping Spambots with Apache, Perl, MySQL and ipchains, it appears that the spambots have evolved somewhat. They seem to come in using a search engine to find promising pages, and then spoof the User-Agent field and generally try to behave as much like a real person as possible. Here is an update to my original article. This is something that anyone who runs a website and dislikes spambots should be aware of..."

If I ever have children I might let it go at that. jamie writes: "'If I ever have children,' says Rich Dreher, 'I would want them to see and touch one of the very first 'real' personal computers, not some simulation of an Apple in a window on a Pentium VIII running Windows 2012.' Over the last few months he's put together a CompactFlash/IDE adapter card for the Apple //e and IIgs, and now he's taking orders. The largest hard drive that ProDOS supports, as flash RAM, costs $14! Seeing the card really brought back memories..."

We mentioned this a while ago, before the pressing need of Apple ][ owners was quite so evident.

What's a little $80 million mistake among friends? Sinjun writes: "In what is believed to be one of the first prison sentences given to the creator of a virus, David L. Smith of the infamous Melissa plague recieves 20 months in federal lockup. I would have thought he would recieve more, seeing the massive amount of money lost by corporate America resulting from Melissa. Oh well, this is the precedent that has been set."

Smith should be grateful that his victims weren't allowed to each pluck one hair from his body per Melissa message received.

But what about the GBA? bobbydigitales writes: "A while back someone suggested porting linux to Samsungs GP32 handheld games console. As I own one, I did a bit of 'googling' and found a post from a guy at Samsung about a problem he was having with his linux port to the s3c2400x chip (this constitutes most of the GP32's hardware). It seems he finished his port as he sent me all the patches and instructions needed to compile the kernal for the s3c2400x.

As I dont have any experience porting linux i thought I'd share this information with the world and see if anyone could offer help and/or suggestions on how to proceed. Here are the files and info.

Samsung have completed the following drivers:

• LCD
• Serial
• USB Host (with mouse driver),
• Sound
• Keyboard
• Network (not actually on the GP32 chip)

Things that are missing:

• bootloader,
• SmartMedia Card driver"

I knew I should have ordered a few. Alex Law writes "Only days after Slashdot's article about Creative Labs great deal on VoIP Blasters, it appears that they are no longer in production or available from Creative's web site. Shame; mine arrived yesterday, and we were all quite impressed."

From the Mozilla front: Lots of good reports and an oops. The good stuff -- reaper20 writes "With 1.0 around the corner, it seems like the folks over at Mozilla.org have their hands full. Between interviews and last minute security bug fixes, it seems like the Mozilla is poised for the big push to 1.0. David Hyatt brings up the IE Advantage, and the death of user-experince based browsers. Mozilla.org itself has stood firm on some of these marketing driven issues - yet some changes have caused some interesting developments in the Mozilla community. The recent context menu revisions and personal toolbar recommendations by Netscape have caused a bit of controversy. (Bugzilla entries ommitted for obvious reasons)

Recently, the mozilla/browser and Chimera projects have been started to address certain usability problems and the desire for OS X native widgets. With Galeon and other Mozilla derivatives getting better and better, it seems that Mozilla 'proper' will serve as a platform for derivative browsers customized for the target platform. Lots of standards-compliant clients each tailored to user needs, sounds like what web was originally designed for."

And the oops -- An Anonymous Coward writes: "An Israeli software firm has discovered a flaw in Netscape and Mozilla software that allows code hidden in a Web page to read files from the user's PC. The bug is a more serious variant of one patched in Microsoft's Internet Explorer in February."

Interested in a free domain for your open-source project? Huh, are ya? "Too bad, sucker," says the .cx registrar. On the other hand, you can drink beer (or sarsparilla) and talk tech with folks smarter than your average bear, create poetry using such fine poetic-sounding things as "Python" and "Java," and even let other people know the names of those who you would call Spammers. Read on, if the gist is really not enough.

See, what we really meant was ... From the inimitable jamie: In February we reported that the .cx registrar was offering free domains to open-source projects. Now, their Board of Directors claims this is "inconsistent with the basic principals [sic] of fairness...this policy has been cancelled." Their FAQ has been changed from this to this accordingly. The board meeting promises "existing registrants will be 'grandfathered-in' and a new second level registry for the oss community will be established." Presumably that means new applicants will get YourOpenSourceProject.free.cx or something. Props to jmason and TBTF for the above links.

LinuxBierwanderungenrundeninkreisen, oder? One of the cool things about Free software is that there's an attitude of joviality and conviviality among its users and developers -- as evidenced by the recurring Linuxbierwangerungen, as reported in Slashdot last week. Even the WSJ notices, evidently: alanw writes "This article is fairly accurate, although we were mostly drinking real ale, not lager."

The article also mentions the oh-so-intriguing idea of simultaneous, net-linked Bierwanderungen on different continents. I vote for the mountains of Maine, New Hampshire or Tennessee as good trial U.S. locations -- if you know any organizers, make sure they leave comments below about a U.S. Bierwanderung!

Opting in, Sir? Opting out? Headphones, Sir? Red Wine? White wine? discHead writes "The Mail Abuse Prevention System has announced that a temporary restraining order filed to prevent them from listing Harris Interactive in the Realtime Blackhole List has been denied."

So long as no one is required to abide by the list that MAPS creates of mail abusers, would a restraining order preventing them from listing a spammer (by their definition) ever work? I rather hope not.

No, not the envelope with "those" pictures, the envelope with the winners! Tim McNerney writes: "The second round winners in the Software Carpentry competition have been announ ced. Though the test harness category got dropped in the process, the config, build and track categories all have winners along with judge's commentary. Next step is to choosing developers to implement the winners." And speaking of lucky winners (you may not already be a winner, in this case), at0m writes "The Haiku Generator Challenge has been completed, and the results have been posted. For those who are not familiar with the contest, the goal was to create a program that used a user-inputted RDF file and created three lines with 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively. To see the winning entries, visit the challenge page. dotcomma has also announced a new, less difficult challenge, which can be found here."

Martin Ling writes: "The Linuxbierwanderung 2000 , at Coniston in the UK's Lake District, is currently in full swing. There is an ongoing live site with pictures and a diary, including details of our Beowulf projects. And of course, there's a webcam. Events have included talks on SETI & radio astronomy, wearable computing, and a trip to the Sellafield nuclear plant. Oh, and that whole lot in the village hall is running through one 33.6kbps modem .... Emails to this address should get through, and I will print them on the notice board."

Martin Ling writes: "The Linuxbierwanderung 2000 , at Coniston in the UK's Lake District, is currently in full swing. There is an ongoing live site with pictures and a diary, including details of our Beowulf projects. And of course, there's a webcam. Events have included talks on SETI & radio astronomy, wearable computing, and a trip to the Sellafield nuclear plant. Oh, and that whole lot in the village hall is running through one 33.6kbps modem .... Emails to this address should get through, and I will print them on the notice board."

Martin Ling writes: "The Linuxbierwanderung 2000 , at Coniston in the UK's Lake District, is currently in full swing. There is an ongoing live site with pictures and a diary, including details of our Beowulf projects. And of course, there's a webcam. Events have included talks on SETI & radio astronomy, wearable computing, and a trip to the Sellafield nuclear plant. Oh, and that whole lot in the village hall is running through one 33.6kbps modem .... Emails to this address should get through, and I will print them on the notice board."

Lev_Arris writes "According to this article on the Heise newsticker (in German) IBM have donated their Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) implementation to the Apache project. SOAP was originally designed to help business 2 business communication take place between incompatible systems. (via XML) With this move, IBM again show their support for the most widely used webserver software after having integrated Apache into their WebSphere package two years ago. "

troc writes: Here's the "info on this year's Linux Beer Hike sponsored by SuSE (and others). It's a European event, where Linux users wander around a nice hilly area, drink beer and exercise their minds of an evening doing Linuxy stuff. " I wanted to go last year, but my flabby ass probably shouldn't be goin' on ye old hacker hike ;)

Wired News has an enjoyable report of the Linuxbierwanderung (Linux Beer Hike). It sounds like it was a wonderful event, and you can't beat the admission (free)! I almost feel stupid for missing out on this, even if I don't drink. As a bonus, they even got to see the eclipse.

Unit3 writes "Finally a real competitor to the iMac from a Wintel manufacturer: NEC's Z1 appears to not only outpower the iMac, but includes some very nice design and expandbility ideas that most of the iMac ripoffs these days are missing. " At $2500 I'm not quite sure that its an iMac competitor, but it has several other features that are quite tasty. Course it has to run Linux... I still think I'd prefer a VAIO.

troc sent us the the British strike site for this weekend's European Internet Users Telecommunications boycott. The boycott is over having to pay metered internet phone bills, which quite frankly, seems almost as silly as US crypto laws. There is also a site for the EU as well.

Another member of Clan Anonymous Coward writes in with this question: "I have been looking for a quad pII board but have yet to actually find one. If you know where I can find one, send me an email to wakko@animx.eu.org. Please send all 'pII's sucks amd rocks' messages to /dev/null."