Slashdot Mirror

eldavojohn writes "There has long been speculation on why the Sun's surface is a mere ten thousand degrees while the atmosphere can reach millions. Space.com is reporting that the mystery has now been solved. Researchers looked for Alfven waves in the solar chromosphere and found them. Followup studies employing simulations demonstrated that the energetics work out to transfer energy from the Sun's surface to its overlying corona.. The magnetic waves may also be the power source behind the solar wind."

KrispySausage writes "A recently-released roadmap for the next major Window release — Windows 7 — indicates that Microsoft is planning to release the new operating system in the second half of 2009, rather than the anticipated release date of some time in 2010. This quickly-approaching release date would seem to be at least partially verified by news of a milestone build available for review by an anonymous third party." We've previously discussed the upcoming new OS version, as well as its danger to Vista.

Brad Eleven writes "The AP reports that the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has invoked executive privilege to justify withholding information in its response to a lawsuit. The state of California is challenging the agency's decision to block their attempt to curb the emissions from new cars and trucks. In response, the EPA has delivered documents requested by the Freedom of Information Act for the discovery phase of the lawsuit — but the documents are heavily redacted. That is, the agency has revealed that it did spend many hours meeting to discuss the issue, but refuses to divulge the details or the outcomes of the meetings. Among the examples cited, 16 pages of a 43-page Powerpoint presentation are completely blank except for the page titles. An EPA spokesperson used language similar to other recent claims of executive privilege, citing 'the chilling effect that would occur if agency employees believed their frank and honest opinions and analysis expressed as part of assessing California's waiver request were to be disclosed in a broad setting.'"

pfman writes "A University of Washington researcher has developed a contact lens including circuitry and a matrix of LEDs. Although not yet a working prototype, this may be a foundation for terminator/robocop style overlay displays in which computer graphics could be superimposed on your normal vision. 'Building the lenses was a challenge because materials that are safe for use in the body, such as the flexible organic materials used in contact lenses, are delicate. Manufacturing electrical circuits, however, involves inorganic materials, scorching temperatures and toxic chemicals. Researchers built the circuits from layers of metal only a few nanometers thick, about one thousandth the width of a human hair, and constructed light-emitting diodes one third of a millimeter across.'" Kotaku notes that this has some obvious gaming implications.

Hugh Pickens writes "Columnist Saul Hansell is hosting a debate about copyright issues and technology on his blog at the New York Times . On one side Rick Cotton, the general counsel of NBC Universal, says that anyone who is intellectually honest must 'acknowledge, confront and speak to the tidal wave of unlawful, wholesale reproduction and distribution of copyrighted content that is currently occurring in the digital world' and that we should be 'identify workable, flexible and effective approaches that reduce piracy without being intrusive and that fully respect other interests such as privacy and fair use.' Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, responds that 'locks will be broken, and so a business model that depends on locking is very vulnerable' adding that locks may form a part of certain successful business models but 'too much reliance on locking can seriously backfire.' Wu and Cotton will respond to each other and to comments by readers today." As for the man on the street, Panaqqa wrote us with word that the Question Copyright site has posted an interesting video of ordinary people explaining why they think copyright exists. It's pretty clear that most people don't understand it at all.

psyph3r writes "The Japanese communications ministry is investing in a new broadcast display technology with NHK to launch a 33 million pixel, 24-point surround-sound broadcast standard by 2015. The standard will use a video data rate of 24Gbps and an audio data rate of 28Mbps. This must be surreal in person."

DirectedImpact noted an amusing little compilation of 10 strange keyboards. Some of them you've probably seen before (the laser keyboard, the optimus OLED keyboard) and others are quite real (I actually had one of those split keyboards for awhile) and others are pretty out there: like the keyboard built into the lacy doily placemat thingee.

flutterecho writes "A sophomore at Valdosta State University was expelled after criticizing his university's plan to build two new parking garages with student fees. In a letter apparently slipped under his dorm room door, Ronald Zaccari, the university's president, wrote that he 'present[ed] a clear and present danger to this campus' and referred to an image on the student's Facebook page which contained a threatening description. 'As additional evidence of the threat posed by Barnes, the document referred to a link he posted to his Facebook profile whose accompanying graphic read: "Shoot it. Upload it. Get famous. Project Spotlight is searching for the next big thing. Are you it?" It doesn't mention that Project Spotlight was an online digital video contest and that "shoot" in that context meant "record."' In a post-Virginia Tech world, has university surveillance of online identities gone too far?"

porkpickle tips us to a BBC article on the quasar OJ287, a binary object containing largest black hole yet discovered, weighing in at 18 billion times the mass of Sol. Researchers were able to estimate its mass due to the presence of a smaller black hole in orbit around it. When the smaller companion's orbit intersects OJ287's accretion disk, once every 12 years, it triggers a burst of radiation that was detected by the Spitzer Space Telescope. More detail and a diagram are available on the Turku University site.

eldavojohn writes "With $200 machines being all the rage these days, it's surprising that more coverage hasn't been given to Shuttle's KPC which is an Intel Celeron processor, a 945GC chipset, 512MB of memory and either a 60GB or 80GB HDD. With deals like these, will Linux become the dominant home operating system for the thrifty?"

buzzardsbay writes "Already forgotten Major League Baseball's Mitchell Report? Here's another kind of 'cheaters' list that folks will want to avoid. Baseline Magazine has compiled the top 12 companies fined by the Business Software Alliance last year for not playing by the rules of asset management. According to the report, many of the BSA's busts are made possible through a BSA Reward Program, which offers up to $1 million to individuals who report offending companies."

porkpickle writes A cloned pig whose genes were altered to make it glow fluorescent green has passed on the trait to its young, a development that could lead to the future breeding of pigs for human transplant organs, a Chinese university reported."

Christiangrays writes "Linux creator Linus Torvalds has used an interview being made public by the Linux Foundation to stress that version 2 of the GPL still makes the most sense for the Linux kernel over the newer GPL version 3. GPL 3, which was released last year by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), reflects the FSF's goals while GPL 2 closely matches what Torvalds thinks a licence should do, Torvalds said. "I want to pick the licence that makes the most sense for what I want to do. And at this point in time, Version 2 matches what I think we want to do much, much better than Version 3," said Torvalds, who is now a fellow at the foundation. He was interviewed in late-October by Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin."

porkpickle writes "Russia plans to participate in a European mission to investigate Jupiter's moon Europa and search for simple life forms. The head of the Space Research Institute, Lev Zelyony, said a project to explore the giant gaseous planet Jupiter would shortly be included in the program of the European Space Agency (ESA) for the years 2015 to 2025."

Panaqqa writes "It's taken some time, but the EFF's Patent Busting Project is making progress. In the latest news, the USPTO has now officially rejected one of the 10 awful patents targeted, making the world safe again for administering tests over the Internet. This joins the reexamination of a patent on automated remote access of a computer over a network and the revocation of a patent on recording live performances to CD as notable successes for the EFF."

hairyfeet writes "Aviv Raff, an Israeli researcher known for his work in hunting browser bugs, has revealed a Firefox spoofing vulnerability which could allow identity thieves to dupe users into giving up their password. According to Mr. Raff Firefox fails to sanitize single quotes and spaces in the 'Realm' value of an authentication header. Raff was quoted as saying 'This makes it possible for an attacker to create a specially crafted Realm value which will look as if the authentication dialog came from a trusted site.' This vulnerability was shown to be in the latest Firefox, version 2.0.0.11 and until Mozilla fixes this vulnerability Mr. Raff recommends in his blog 'not to provide username and password to Web sites which show this dialog.'"

eldavojohn sends us an article about a discovery by Carnegie Mellon researchers that explains why repetitive studying or training is effective. Previous research had suggested the opposite, which ran counter to nearly everyone's personal experience. Scientists hope that this information will help us to learn more about diseases which affect the memory, such as Alzheimer's. From the article: "In a series of experiments the researchers blocked different receptors, including NMDA, to see the receptors' effect on long-term neural stimulation. They found that while the NMDA receptor is required to begin neural strengthening, a second neurotransmitter receptor -- the metabotropic glutamate (mGlu) receptor -- comes into play after this first phase of cellular learning. ...blocking mGlu receptors caused strengthening to stop."

eldavojohn writes "It might seem like they've come full circle, but the movie injection method has gone from TV to mail to online download to TV on demand. And Netflix & LG are betting it's going to be a hit. They're also betting you will want to buy yet another device for your home theater. A Wall Street Journal article notes: 'The partnership between Netflix, Los Gatos, Calif., and South Korea's LG represents another gamble by technology companies that video from the Internet, which is commonly downloaded to personal computers, will go mainstream when users can easily access it from TV sets. So far, Internet television products such as Apple Inc.'s Apple TV have largely been unsuccessful, stymied by a poor selection of videos, complexity of use and other shortcomings.'"

David Martinjak writes "Linux Firewalls, authored by Michael Rash and published by No Starch Press, covers five main topics: traditional packet filtering with iptables, port scan detection, snort rule translation, port knocking, and log visualization. At first I considered only skimming the chapters regarding iptables packet filtering. I have a good amount of experience with iptables, and have been running it for several years. Thankfully I decided to give the first chapter a good read. Right from the start, the book presented valuable information and pulled me in." Read on for the rest of David's review. Linux Firewalls author Michael Rash pages 336 publisher No Starch Press rating 9 reviewer David Martinjak ISBN 1-59327-141-7 summary Linux Firewalls discusses the technical details of the iptables firewall and the Netfilter framework that are built into the Linux kernel. The chapters about iptables packet filtering are crucial for any reader new to networking or firewall administration. Experienced users might pick up a tip or two, as well. Linux Firewalls contained a wealth of knowledge about packet structure in addition to a solid explanation of iptables usage. I was rather impressed by the variety of information presented in the early chapters. The book of course detailed the syntax and logistics of iptables, but also provided detailed examples of attacks at the network, transport, and application layers.

Packet filtering was followed by port scan detection. When I first started using GNU/Linux, one application in my toolbox was PortSentry. PortSentry was designed to counter-act port scans, and minimized the amount of information that could be discovered from a scan. I lost track of PortSentry for some reason, but was glad to have almost re-discovered it in a new form. PSAD is the Port Scan Attack Detector and was developed by the book's author, Michael Rash, along with contributions from the open source community.

PSAD was created as a lightweight network intrusion detection component. The book explained how PSAD can quickly react to port scans by analyzing iptables log entries; and effectively reduce the surface area exposed to the attacker. The differences between PSAD and PortSentry were also enumerated, which showed several advantages for using PSAD.

Linux Firewalls did a fantastic job of detailing how to install and configure PSAD. This seems to be par for the course with No Starch Press as each book I have read from them was meticulous with regards to installation and configuration specifics. Additionally, the topics of installing and configuring the book's other two main applications, fwsnort and fwknop, were also properly addressed.

I don't want to give away too much of the material in Linux Firewalls; so I will just say that the chapters on fwsnort, fwknop, and log visualization were all on par with the earlier sections of the book. The information did not let up at any point — there were useful examples and details throughout each chapter. Additionally, there was a good amount of consistency with regard to how the chapters progressed, and the type of information that was presented along the way. All together, Linux Firewalls was an impressive read.

There were no real disappointments with this book. The reading did get a bit tedious at times with regard to configuration specifics, but it was only due to the depth of helpful explanation. Had I been working with the applications while reading (instead of just reading), the content would have been much more relevant. In the end, however, the variety resulted in a rather impressive and enjoyable book. The coverage of psad, fwsnort, and fwknop were welcomed additions. Each of the central topics were thoroughly explained in an informative, yet engaging manner. Essentially, I did not want to stop reading.

The netfilter/iptables software is licensed under the GNU General Public License, and can be found at http://netfilter.org. The psad, fwsnort, and fwknop applications are licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 2, and can be downloaded from http://cipherdyne.org.

The publisher hosts a Web page which contains an online copy of the table of contents, portions of reviews, links to purchase the electronic and print versions of the book, and a sample chapter ("Chapter 10: Deploying fwsnort") in PDF format.

David Martinjak is a programmer, GNU/Linux addict, and the director of 2600 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He can be reached at david.martinjak@gmail.com.

You can purchase Linux Firewalls from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

eldavojohn writes "We're all well aware of the scams that sometimes happen in online games like Eve Online. But despite this looking primarily like a problem with Eve Online, the MIT Technology Review brings us stories from Second Life and the very real $700,000 (USD) in Linden Dollars that has recently disappeared in what is appearing to be a classic ponzi scheme by a company named Ginko Banking. Unbelievably high interest rates coupled with some shady withdrawal limits leads to classic epic losses to investors. Eve Online was merely virtual currency but Second Life has a real monetary value associated with Linden Dollars & therefore is certain to see more and more scams pop up like this. How can Linden Labs set up a safety net to catch things like this?"

eldavojohn writes "As more and more businesses become dependent on barcodes, people are pointing out common problems involving the security of one- or two-dimensional barcode software. You might scoff at this as a highly unlikely hacking platform but from the article, 'FX tested the access system of an automatically operated DVD hire shop near his home. This actually demanded a biometric check as well, but he simply refused it. There remained a membership card with barcode, membership number and PIN. After studying the significance of the bar sequences and the linear digit combinations underneath, FX managed to obtain DVDs that other clients had already paid for, but had not yet taken away. Automated attacks on systems were also possible, he claimed. But you had to remember not to use your own membership number.' The article also points out that boarding passes work on this basis — with something like GNU Barcode software and a template of printed out tickets, one might be able to take some nice vacations."

eldavojohn writes to mention that LinuxPlanet has a brief discussion on what 2008 may hold for FOSS. The list includes thoughts on KDE 4, OOXML, DRM, and 3-D desktops. What boons for FOSS are you looking forward to in 2008?

Utoxin noted that Child's Play has raised the bar for their annual games for hospitals charity. They say "Not only did we break the million dollar mark, but we decimated it with our new total of $1,135,000! This significant achievement made this holiday season a happier, brighter one in our fifty partner hospitals. To everyone who has contributed to this amazing milestone, thank you! The hospital wish lists are still online, and some have seen new items added. While we try to get lots of new games and more to the children in time for the holidays, the hospitals have a need for equipment year-round. Likewise, we will continue to accept donations through Amazon, PayPal and the mail until next year's fundraiser kicks off."

eldavojohn writes "New Jersey just passed legislation making it illegal for sex offenders to use the internet. NJ congresswoman Linda D. Greenstein said, 'When Megan's Law was enacted, few could envision a day when a sex offender hiding behind a fake screen name would be a mouse-click away from new and unwitting victims. Sex offenders cannot be given an opportunity to abuse the anonymity the Internet can provide as a means of opening a door to countless new potential victims.' While they still can search for jobs, this is a major expansion over the prior legislation which barred them from social networking sites like facebook or myspace."

eldavojohn writes "A year after opening its movie download service, Wal-Mart has abandoned the endeavor. They claim this is a result of HP's decision to stop supporting its video download store software. The article also notes that, unlike iTunes, Wal-Mart offered variable pricing which attracted a lot of studios. 'The world's largest retailer instead turned its rental service over to Netflix Inc. Wal-Mart still operates a music download service and continues to sell CDs and DVDs at retail stores and over the Internet for shipping by mail.' Is this evidence of the strength of unified pricing in media downloads or just another company being squished by the giant Netflix & Apple?"

DynaSoar writes "MSNBC is carrying an AP article reviewing a book, due out January 7, that claims to show definitive evidence that Bell stole the essential idea for telephony from Elisha Gray. Author Seth Shulman shows that Bell's notebooks contain false starts, and then after a 12-day gap during which he visited the US Patent Office, suddenly show an entirely different design, very similar to Gray's design for multiplexing Morse code signals. Shulman claims that Bell copied the design from Gray's patent application and was improperly given credit for earlier submission, with the help of a corrupt patent examiner and aggressive lawyers. Shulman also claims that fear of being found out is the reason Bell distanced himself from the company that carried his name. And if Gray Telephone doesn't seem to roll off the tongue, Shulman also noted that both of them were two decades behind the German inventor Johann Philipp Reis, who produced the first working telephony system."

SpinelessJelly writes "It appears that Google's Android, criticised by Microsoft as vaporware, has sprung to life. Prototype devices are circulating, software developers are experimenting with the SDK and PC-based Android emulator, and there are rumours of a show-stopping debut at February's Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona. Numerous examples of the Android GUI are also starting to leak out."

markybob writes "An open-source bittorrent client, Deluge, now provides an internal, anonymizing browser to protect its users from overzealous ISPs. The client runs on Windows, Linux and OS X. From the site: "Everyone knows that it is common practice for ISPs to do their best to either block or throttle bittorrent users. We believe that this is wrong and unethical, as there are many legal uses for bittorrent. If an ISP is throttling or blocking bittorrent traffic, you can pretty much bet that they're tracking which users visit bittorrent-related sites so that they can better block or throttle those users." Their forum has more info"

thefickler sends us word that Hilary Clinton has taken a public stand in favor of shielding children from game and other animation content that she deems inappropriate. Quote: "When I am president, I will work to protect children from inappropriate video game content." Politically, this puts her in company with Republican Mitt Romney on the subject of game censorship. Her fellow Democrats are content to let the industry self-regulate.

bearer_of_bad_news points us to a C|net article which states that Matthew Szulik is stepping down as the president and chief executive of Red Hat. Szulik is citing family health reasons, and he plans to remain chairman of the board. Red Hat has indicated that his replacement will be former Delta Airlines COO James Whitehurst. Quoting the article: "On a conference call, Szulik said Whitehurst stood 'head and shoulders' above other candidates interviewed in a recruiting process. He was a programmer earlier in his career and runs four versions of Linux at home." We discussed Szulik's ascension to CEO back in 1999.

Bogie Lowenstein is one of many readers letting us know that the FTC has approved Google's acquisition of DoubleClick in a 4-to-1 vote. The FTC essentially blew off the privacy concerns about the merger, saying it lacked the legal authority to block the deal on any grounds except antitrust. The EU's review of the deal is still going forward, with a decision due by April 2, 2008; the privacy sensibility there is more sharply focused.

inkslinger77 writes "A team of ten MIT students powered a supercomputer for twenty minutes by pedaling bicycles. They duly claimed the world record for human-powered computing (HPC). They powered a SiCortex SC648 supercomputer with a Linux cluster of 648 CPUs and almost 1TB of main memory in a single cabinet. The system is low-powered and draws 1,200 watts without needing special power supplies or cooling..."

anthrax writes "Ignoring Congressional and public comments, the FCC voted to relax ownership rules that have prevented broadcasters from owning newspapers in the nation's 20 largest media markets. After holding several public hearings that overwhelmingly opposed the relaxation of the rules, and Congressional hearing where Democrats and Republicans (even Ted 'Tubes' Stevens) voiced opposition to the move, the FCC voted 3 to 2 to relax ownership. On the same day the FCC voted 3 to 2 (by a different split) to cap the size of any cable company at 30% of the nationwide market, a limit Comcast is up against."

thefickler writes "Australia's largest Internet service provider Telstra BigPond has removed OpenOffice from its unmetered file download area following the launch of its own, free, hosted, office application, BigPond Office. The removal of OpenOffice was brought to TECH.BLORGE's attention by a reader, who complained to Telstra BigPond's support department about no longer being able to download OpenOffice updates. The support people were quite open about why OpenOffice was no longer available, i.e. because it was perceived to be competitive with BigPond Office."

eldavojohn writes "A ZDNet blog reports stats from Secunia showing OSX averaged 20.25 vulnerabilities per month while XP & Vista combined averaged 3.67/month. Is this report card's implication accurate, or is this a symptom of one company turning a blind eye while the other concentrates on timely bugfixes? 'While Windows Vista shows fewer flaws than Windows XP and has more mitigating factors against exploitation, the addition of Windows Defender and Sidebar added 4 highly critical flaws to Vista that weren't present in Windows XP. Sidebar accounted for three of those additional vulnerabilities and it's something I am glad I don't use. The lone Defender critical vulnerability that was supposed to defend Windows Vista was ironically the first critical vulnerability for Windows Vista.'"

eldavojohn writes "You might know the name Peter Norvig from the classic big green book, 'AI: A Modern Approach.' He's been working for Google since 2001 as Director of Search Quality. An interview with Norvig at MIT's Technology Review has a few interesting insights into the 'search mindset' at the company. It's kind of surprising that he claims they have no intent to allow natural questions. Instead he posits, 'We think what's important about natural language is the mapping of words onto the concepts that users are looking for. But we don't think it's a big advance to be able to type something as a question as opposed to keywords ... understanding how words go together is important ... That's a natural-language aspect that we're focusing on. Most of what we do is at the word and phrase level; we're not concentrating on the sentence.'"

Davide writes "There is a quite an interesting human size robot that comes from UAE, REEM-A. It has some interesting skills as dynamic walking (of course), object recognition, voice recognition, self localization and mapping, long battery life and face recognition. Recently, the development team announced that the second prototype, REEM-B, will be presented in February 2008. The second prototype has many improvements: a fingered hand with 12 motors, the ability to go up and down stairs, additional force sensors on the arms, ultrasonic range finders to avoid obstacles and a completely new look." Or, if you prefer something a bit cheaper, you could go with the $30 DIY Android.

Lost_my_regs writes "I had a .com domain name relevant only to me, no legal trademark, registered and hosted at a provider that went bust. When attempting to re-host the domain I discovered, to my unpleasant surprise, that the domain is now registered by a domain farming company (name removed). My question is: Is there any way to claim back my domain?"

kastababy writes "In yet another instance of up-and-coming browser developers fighting back against the Microsoft behemoth, the makers of Opera have filed a complaint with the European Union against Microsoft. In their complaint, they allege that IE's 77% market share abuses its dominant position by tying IE to Windows and its refusal to accept Web standards, causing significant interoperability issues. The complaint also requests that the EU's Antitrust Division force Microsoft to separate IE from Windows and accept several different standards, thereby resolving major interoperability issues and providing consumers more choice in the browser market." Update: 12/14 19:47 GMT by Z : We also discussed this yesterday.

eldavojohn writes "Well, you can finally get genetically modified cloned animals. South Korean scientists have shown it is possible to alter a protein via therapeutic cloning to 'artificially [create] animals with human illnesses linked to genetic causes.' The images of these animals are amazing. This research was headed by Kong Il-keun, the first person in the country to clone cats in 2004." There is always the chance that this is a hoax, but far too amusing to ignore.

eldavojohn writes "There exists a little-known problem of missing regular matter that has perhaps been overshadowed by the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. Computer models show that there should be about 40% more regular matter than we see... so where is it? From the article: 'The study indicated a significant portion of the gas is in the filaments — which connect galaxy clusters — hidden from direct observation in enormous gas clouds in intergalactic space known as the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium, or WHIM, said CU-Boulder Professor Jack Burns... The team performed one of the largest cosmological supercomputer simulations ever, cramming 2.5 percent of the visible universe inside a computer to model a region more than 1.5 billion light-years across.' This hypothesis will be investigated and hopefully proved/disproved when telescopes are completed in Chile and the Antarctic. The paper will be up for review in this week's edition of the the Astrophysical Journal."

DynaSoar writes "2008 Could be a the year of the Spaceship. Virgin Galactic intends to unveil White Knight 2 as well as Spaceship 2 during the next year, at this point planning for January. Burt Rutan, always reticent to comments on progress of any project, says nothing to support or contradict Virgin Galactic's announcement. However, the report states that Spaceship 2 is 50% complete and White Knight 2 is 60% complete. In addition, Virgin Galactic is considering using White Knight 2, or possible its successor White Knight 3, to put small satellites in orbit for a cost of US$3 million, less than half the current front runner in (projected) low cost orbital launches; SpaceX's Falcon at US$6.7 million. Tourism aside, this could be an extremely lucrative spin off of Virgin Galactic's original plans. If this turns out to be a profitable endeavor, the cost of tourism flights could drop significantly."

tripper700 writes "25 years since its original release, a definitive version of Ridley Scott's science fiction masterwork Blade Runner, Blade Runner: The Final Cut, has been released. So what exactly has changed? And is it worth all the fuss? SFFMedia describes each change in detail. Is it just a patch up job attempting to cash in on a cult film? Or like an oil painter retouching a masterpiece, or a novelist polishing prose, is Ridley Scott simply trying to perfect his original vision?"

eldavojohn writes "Shortly following the frustrations of IE7, Gates claims that he is unaware that IE8 Secrecy has been alienating developers. Ten influential bloggers met with Bill on Tuesday and asked Gates questions about why they are no longer receiving information on IE. From Molly Holzschlag's blog: 'Something seems to have changed, where there is no messaging now for the last six months to a year going out on the IE team. They seem to have lost the transparency that they had. This conversation [between Web developers and the IE team] seems to have been pretty much shut down, and I'm very concerned as to why that is.' To which Bill replied: 'I'll have to ask [IE general manager] Dean [Hachamovitch] what the hell is going on, I mean, we're not, there's not like some deep secret about what we're doing with IE.'"

explosivejared writes "TheStreet discusses Google's possible strategy options in the bid for the 700 mhz spectrum. The end goal of getting the government to put an open access stipulation on the spectrum, Google's end goal, is almost a given — in the author's opinion. At this point, he says, Google hardly even needs to win to 'win.' From the article: 'Rather than actually winning the auction, Google's participation is likely intended to secure what it sees as the real reward: ensuring that whoever ends up owning the spectrum allows the open access of applications and devices. Indeed, as long as this goal is met, it's hard to see why Google would want to take on the costly task of building and running its own network. But given how much is at stake when it comes to the mobile market, Google's vigilance is shrewd, even if it never planned to own the spectrum.'"

explosivejared writes "A private company by the name of Odyssey Moon has become the first team to complete registration for Google's Lunar X Challenge. They will likely be competing with several heavyweights in the field, as Carnegie Mellon University, along with many others, has already expressed an interest in the competition."

eldavojohn writes "Toyota has unveiled a robot that can play the violin. From the article: 'Toyota said it planned to further advance the robot's dexterity to enable it to use tools and assist with domestic duties and nursing and medical care. The robot has 17 joints in both of its hands and arms now.' It seems there have been small — or maybe even strange, impractical — advances in robotics repeatedly with demonstrations of robots performing a specialized task. Are we merely struggling to hard code each human activity as we strive for an all purpose android? Is there a chance artificial intelligence & robotics will ever become generalized enough to make interaction interesting?"

Gary writes to tell us that NEC has developed a new SRAM compatible MRAM. The new memory module is capable of speeds up to 250MHz, the world's fastest to date. "MRAM are expected to generate new value and applications for future electronic devices thanks to their nonvolatility, unlimited write endurance, high speed operation, and ability to cut memory power dissipation in half. For example, these features could enable instant start up of PCs and prevent drive recorders from losing data after a sudden break in power in the future. As substitutes for system LSI-embedded SRAM, MRAM can provide even more value as they are expected to enable extremely low power dissipation of system LSIs because they can sleep when they are not in use and wake up instantly."

privatemusings writes "Wikipedians are up in arms at the revelations that respected administrators have been discussing blocking and banning editors on a secret mailing list. The tensions have spilled over throughout the 'encyclopedia anyone can edit' and news agencies are sniffing around. The Register has this fantastic writeup — read it here first." The article says that some Wikipedians believe Jimbo Wales has lost face by supporting the in-crowd of administrators and rebuking the whistle blower who leaked the existence of the secret mailing list.

eldavojohn writes "Perhaps in response to recent news that the lawsuit against the OLPC may be a scam, Peru's government has announced they want 260,000 OLPCs and a Mexican billionaire by the name of Carlos Slim has also asked for 50,000 that he wishes to distribute in Mexico. Things are looking good for the OLPC."