Slashdot Mirror

A month ago we noted that the legal system had put Righthaven on hold, but now redwolfe7707 noted that "A federal judge in Nevada says a Las Vegas law firm targeting unauthorized content on the Internet cannot sue others over a news company's copyrights. The Las Vegas Sun reported Tuesday the dismissal of a lawsuit by copyright enforcer Righthaven LLC against the website Democratic Underground. U.S. District Court Chief Judge Roger Hunt says copyright plaintiffs must control the rights to material in order to sue for copyright infringement."

skybon writes "After similar attacks on Sony and Square Enix, Codemasters' website has now been hacked as well. The intrusion took place on 3 June, and is believed to have compromised members' names, usernames, screen names, email addresses, date of birth, encrypted passwords, newsletter preferences, any biographies entered by users, details of last site activity, IP addresses and Xbox Live Gamertags. In a letter sent out to CodeM subscribers, the company recommended changing passwords as soon as possible."

Rambo Tribble writes "CNN is running an article detailing the dubious history of Eric Lefkofsky, Groupon's chairman and largest shareholder. It would seem Mr. Lefkofsky has an extensive history of taking investors' money for himself, then bankrupting the businesses invested in." Another article posted today at TechCrunch explores one businesswoman's story of how working with Groupon was the single worst business decision she ever made.

jimmij0770 writes "Three people accused of being behind cyberattacks on the Sony PlayStation store, the Egyptian government and other targets have been arrested in Spain. Quoting: 'Spanish National Police announced the arrests Friday in a statement that alleged the three in custody are leaders of the Spanish section of Anonymous, a loose-knit international activist group that has claimed attacks on companies such as Visa and MasterCard and on government websites. At least one spokesperson for the group had denied responsibility for the attacks on Sony through its AnonOps blog. ... The statement said police began their investigation in October 2010 following a complaint of a denial of service attack on Spain's Ministry of Culture. They analyzed more than two million lines of chat logs and web pages used by the hackers in order to find the three people who were arrested.'"

hasanabbas1987 writes "What is the height of creepy but faithful friendship? Getting 152 Facebook friends' profile pictures tattooed on your arm."

Antipater writes "To the brain, heartbreak and emotional torment are no different from having hot coffee spilled on your hand, reports CNN. They cite a recent study from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in which 40 recently-dumped men and women underwent fMRI scans while having their arm burned or being shown a picture of their ex. The stimuli produced nearly identical brain reactions."

Phoghat sends this quote from Universe Today: "With her most recent drive of 482 feet on June 1, 2011 (Sol 2614), NASA's Opportunity Mars Rover has zoomed past the unimaginable 30 kilometer mark in total odometry since safely landing on Mars nearly seven and one half years ago on Jan 24, 2004. That's 50 times beyond the roughly quarter-mile of roving distance initially foreseen. And Opportunity is still going strong, in good health and has abundant solar power as she continues driving on her ambitious overland trek across the martian plains of Meridiani Planum. She is heading to the giant Endeavour crater, some 22 km in diameter."

Tiek00n writes "Hacker Group 'LulzSec' has gained some attention recently for their hacks of PBS and Sony. Their most recent target: FBI affiliate Infragard. The group claims, 'It has come to our unfortunate attention that NATO and our good friend Barrack Osama-Llama 24th-century Obama have recently upped the stakes with regard to hacking. They now treat hacking as an act of war. So, we just hacked an FBI affiliated website (Infragard, specifically the Atlanta chapter) and leaked its user base. We also took complete control over the site and defaced it...'"

ragnvaldr writes "I'm the 'IT guy' for an office of about a dozen people. And when I say IT guy, I mean I'm the only one here who can use google well enough to figure out how to make things work. We have a 500GB Mac server with a Drobo with 6TB of storage attached. So far all this server does is back up data, and I want to make it a little more useful. We also have a Filemaker server on it, which I have yet to learn how to use at all, let alone efficiently. Any suggestions to make this machine a little more useful?"

BuzzSkyline writes "A few minutes in a high magnetic field (1.3 Tesla) is enough to thin blood by 30%, potentially leading to a new drug-free therapy to prevent heart attacks. The powerful field causes blood cells to line up in chains that flow much more easily than randomly-scattered individual cells, according to research scheduled to appear this month in the journal Physical Review E." I can't help thinking of Penn & Teller's look at magnets-as-medicine, though at least the idea here described sounds testable and doesn't rely on the power of suggestion.

limber writes "The largest Canadian copyright class action suit has been settled for $50 million. The offenders? The four labels comprising the Canadian Recording Industry Association — EMI, Sony Music, Universal Music, and Warner Music. Ahem." The terms of the settlement are a compromise — anyone with works on the pending list can receive compensation while the music industry is absolved of further liability. The two major Canadian licensing agencies (CMRRA and SODRAC) will be tasked with improving the licensing process to prevent future abuse.

Antipater writes "Slashdot readers may remember the announcement and ensuing controversy six months ago over the NASA discovery of microbes that can supposedly incorporate arsenic into their DNA. Now, The Washington Post reports that Science has published a collection of eight scathing critiques of astrobiologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon, her methods, and her conclusions. Wolfe-Simon is starting to fire back and gather her own allies — one wonders if we're in for another cold-fusion style science war."

lukehopewell1 writes "Australian airline giant Qantas has implemented new baggage tags powered by RFID technology. The RFID tag is encoded with the information on a passenger's boarding pass when placed in a bag drop area, and is summarily sent to its destination. But is it any good? ZDNet Australia tested the new systems and found that the system sadly had no intention of sending our cargo."

Oldcynic writes "As Sony struggles to restore the Playstation Network we receive news today of another breach, this time at Sony Ericsson in Canada. 'Sony Corp. spokesman Atsuo Omagari said Wednesday that names, email and encrypted passwords may have been stolen from the Sony Ericsson Canada website, but no credit card information was taken.' Another group managed to penetrate Sony Entertainment Japan yesterday as well. I almost feel bad for them.

ndogg writes "EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow faced down copyright heavyweights ... on a panel he described as 'the Lions Den' discussing issues of intellectual property. He was the lone dissenting voice ... Mitterand had commented that copyright debates had grown so calm now that everyone agreed upon the ground rules."

billlava writes "Wikipedia continues on its inexorable march toward becoming the repository for the world's knowledge — to the tune of four and a half edits a second. Just who is doing all these edits? And where do they live? Erik Zachte compiled data from a day in May 2011 into an interesting set of animations and maps to show update activity as it occurred during the day."

Phoghat writes "An Australian team of researchers scanned the sky using WiggleZ Dark Energy survey and found confirming evidence of Dark Energy. Einstein is correct, as so far, usual." Meanwhile, the International Space Station is looking for dark *matter* .

Rainmaker2006 writes "The latest iteration of Linux kernel is out. The kernel 2.6.39 is listed in kernel.org, ready to be yours!" Linux for Devices has a short overview of what you can expect in the newest kernel; an article at Phoronix (complete with obnoxious pop-out advertising) points out a few bugs, as well.

Steve1960 writes "Amazon.com chief Jeff Bezos says the online retailer won't collect tax from most of its 90 million customers until Congress clearly mandates it. Although a growing number of states are demanding that Amazon collect and remit tax on sales within their borders, such demands are 'interference in interstate commerce' and prohibited by the Constitution, Bezos said."

Tiek00n wrote in with something that might sound familiar, saying, "Microsoft on Monday expanded its use of Facebook within its Bing search engine, adding 'likes' and recommendations from friends and strangers into search results. Going forward, if you search for something one of your Facebook friends has 'liked,' Bing will note that in its search results. Did your sister and roommate 'like' a nearby Italian restaurant? A small photo, the Facebook 'thumbs up' icon, and a note that said they approve will show up in search results, Microsoft said."

Fysx writes with recent comments from Valve co-founder Gabe Newell about how he thinks the traditional video game business model is flawed: "The industry has this broken model, which is one price for everyone. That’s actually a bug, and it’s something that we want to solve through our philosophy of how we create entertainment products. What you really want to do is create the optimal pricing service for each customer and see what’s best for them. We need to give customers, all of them, a robust set of options regarding how they pay for their content. An example is – and this is something as an industry we should be doing better – is charging customers based on how much fun they are to play with. Some people, when they join a server, a ton of people will run with them. Other people, when they join a server, will cause others to leave. We should have a way of capturing that. We should have a way of rewarding the people who are good for our community."

lukehopewell1 writes "The tenth annual AusCERT (Australian Computer Emergency Response Team) conference kicks off today in Queensland, Australia, touting appearances from Microsoft, Telstra, Rio Tinto and the founder of Kaspersky Labs, Eugene Kaspersky. You can watch a video wrap-up of AusCERT conferences in the years gone by, complete with laughs, interviews, old-timey newscasts and that time IBM gave out USB drives laden with malware."

hasanabbas1987 writes "The clash of the Internet Giants reached new heights after a spokesman for Facebook confirmed to Daily Beast that Facebook paid a high level Public Relation firm to publish and spread stories against Google throughout the media to study various methods to examine the allegations that Google has been violating user privacy."

hasanabbas1987 writes "Shell has opened America's first pipe-lined hydrogen fueling station in the town of Torrence in Southern California. Shell wasn't alone in this project as Toyota also helped them in this green deed, all of which was funded by the government. At the moment other hydrogen stations around the US still depend upon trucks to supply them with fuel. This marks a new era of green fueling and hopefully this pipeline spreads to other stations. Many of the big car makers like Toyota, Honda and Mercedes have indicated a mass market for hydrogen powered cars by 2015."

neokushan writes "Sony has been in the news a lot lately — from the PSN downtime and the identity theft issue that came with it, to the numerous court cases launched to try and quell the PS3 hacking scene. It may come as a surprise to many, then, that Sony's mobile smartphone division has taken an almost polar-opposite approach — they're actively encouraging developers to create, modify and install customized Linux kernels into their latest lineup of phones, including the Xperia Play, the device that was once known as the 'PlayStation Phone.'"

greenerd writes "Engineering students at Rice University have solved a huge health concern in developing countries by creating a device that uses the sun to sterilize medical instruments. This invention could help prevent the spread of infection and illness in clinics around the world without access to proper sterilization tools."

Phoghat writes "Early on 4th May 2011, in the skies above Mojave Air and Spaceport CA, SpaceShipTwo, the world's first commercial spaceship, demonstrated its unique reentry 'feather' configuration for the first time. This test flight, the third in less than two weeks, marks another major milestone on the path to powered test flights and commercial operations. SpaceShipTwo (SS2), named VSS Enterprise, has now flown solo seven times since its public roll-out in December 2009 and since the completion of its ground and captive-carry test program."

Phoghat writes "More than 30 years after they were launched, NASA's two Voyager probes have traveled to the edge of the solar system and are on the doorstep of interstellar space. Today, April 28, 2011, NASA held a live briefing to reflect on what the Voyager mission has accomplished — and to preview what lies ahead as the probes prepare to enter the realm of the Milky Way itself."

eldavojohn writes "You're probably familiar with Microsoft's long running assault on Android but, as noticed by Groklaw, Barnes and Noble has fired back saying, 'Microsoft has asserted patents that extend only to arbitrary, outmoded, or non-essential design features, but uses these patents to demand that every manufacturer of an Android-based mobile device take a license from Microsoft and pay exorbitant licensing fees or face protracted and expensive patent infringement litigation.' Barnes and Noble goes on to assert that Microsoft violates 'antitrust laws, threatens competition for mobile device operating systems and is further evidence of Microsoft's efforts to dominate and control Android and other open source operating systems.' The PDF of the filing from two days ago is rife with accusations including, 'Microsoft intends to utilize its patents to control the activities of and extract fees from the designers, developers, and manufacturers of devices, including tablets, eReaders, and other mobile devices, that employ the Android Operating System.' and 'Microsoft has falsely and without justification asserted that its patents somehow provide it with the right to prohibit device manufacturers from employing new versions of the Android Operating System, or third party software.' Barnes and Noble does not mince words when explaining Microsoft's FUD campaign to both the public and developers in its attempts to suppress Android. It's good to see PJ still digging through massive court briefs to bring us the details on IP court battles."

Phoghat writes "STS-134, the final flight of the space shuttle Endeavour – is set to carry several experiments of students from the middle school, high school and collegiate levels. Two of these payloads are sponsored by the NASA Florida. The first experiment is one that could provide some guidance on future long-duration space flight missions, it deals with seed germination. As missions take astronauts further and further away from Earth, they will need to be able to produce their own food. Learning everything possible about the effects of micro-gravity on seeds therefore is viewed as relevant and important research. Another experiment, one comprised of squid embryos is being spearheaded by the University of Florida and will research the physiological impact of the micro-gravity environment on the animal's growth and development."

Phoghat writes "In what is starting to become a familiar theme, researchers have speculated on what types of observational data from distant planetary systems might indicate the presence of an alien civilization. Potential indicators of the presence of an alien civilization might include: atmospheric pollutants, like chlorofluorocarbons – which, unlike methane or molecular oxygen, are clearly manufactured rather than just biogenically produced; propulsion signatures – like how the Vulcans detected humanity in Star Trek: First Contact; evidence of stellar engineering – where a star's lifetime is artificially extended to maintain the habitable zone of its planetary system; or debris created from asteroid mining."

Phoghat writes "The entertainment and electronics industries keep trying to push 3D on consumers, even though a lot of smart people have caught on to the fact that it is a scam and not innovation as the industry would like you to believe. From the article: 'This is a bad experiment that the industry is forcing consumers to subsidize. And since they can’t create a better product, they’ve simply latched on to 3D as a marketing ploy that the entertainment and electronics industries can use to trick people into thinking that they are getting a superior experience. It’s only working because just enough people are falling for the scam to keep it alive.'"

hinesbrad writes "I'm getting really tired of paying ridiculous fees to my cable company just to have a DVR and high speed internet access. A neighbor of mine bought a cheapo Dell computer with an HDMI output. Apparently he streams all of his news live from respective websites, and also watches many of the shows on NBC and Comedy central using this method. He's effectively turned his PC into a DVR and gotten rid of his cable subscription fee. I wonder, how many people have completely gotten rid of their cable/satellite subscription and have now instead moved to a Hulu/Netflix/Content producer website streaming solution instead?" If you've done this, what does your approach include? If you'd like to, what are the bottlenecks?

Floodge writes "High School students at Explore Knowledge Academy in Las Vegas, Nevada have launched a near space photography balloon which took over 2000 pictures of Las Vegas, Henderson, Boulder City, Lake Mead, Hoover Dam, Grand Canyon, and much more! The 'space craft' was built from used and recycled components for under 60 dollars and was inspired by MIT students Project Icarus in 2009." Near-space photography via balloon isn't quite new any more, but price is a great frontier to explore. And I'm glad that there's a school called "Explore Knowledge Academy."

DesScorp writes "'The human race is slowing down,' begins an article in the Wall Street Journal that laments the state of man's quest of aerial speed: we're going backwards. With the end of the Space Shuttle program, man is losing its fastest carrier of human beings (only single use moonshot rockets were faster). 'The shuttles' retirement follows the grounding over recent years of other ultra-fast people carriers, including the supersonic Concorde and the speedier SR-71 Blackbird spy plane. With nothing ready to replace them, our species is decelerating—perhaps for the first time in history,' the article notes. Astronauts are interviewed, and their sadness and disappointment is apparent. In the '60s and '70s, it was assumed that Mach 2+ airline travel would one day be cheap and commonplace. And now it seems that we, and our children, will fly no faster than our grandparents did in 707s. The last major attempt at faster commerical air travel — Boeing's Sonic Cruiser — was abandoned and replaced with the Dreamliner, an airliner designed from the ground up for fuel efficiency."

Trevor James writes "Piling up on my tech bookshelf are a bunch of excellent titles on the Drupal content management system. Earl & Lynette Miles Drupal's Building Blocks is the book on how to use the CCK, Views and Panels modules. It's part of Addison Wesley's Developer's Library and is the definitive guide to the 'trifecta' of Drupal modules. There's a lot of theory and concepts explained in granular detail here as well as recipe style tutorials — soak it up. It's an excellent resource." Read on for the rest of Trevor's review. Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook author Karthik Kumar pages 384 publisher Packt Publishing rating 9/10 reviewer Trevor James ISBN 1847198686 summary For anyone who is beginning their exploration of Drupal front-end theming and theme design The second book and the subject of this review is Karthik Kumar's engaging Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook, recently published by Packt Publishing, the prolific open source publisher. It's a richly detailed hands-on guide to theming Drupal 6 Web sites. I recommend this book for anyone who is beginning their exploration of Drupal front-end theming and theme design. Though the book is focused on Drupal 6, the application and concepts of theming can be applied to Drupal 7. Where Miles' book is focused on each and every detail of the trifecta modules, Kumar's book takes a streamlined approach to teaching Drupal theming, using hands-on exercises. This will appeal to those who like to learn-by-doing.

First, a brief explanation of what Drupal is: simply put, Drupal is a popular open source CMS used by thousands of small & large scale businesses, non-profits, education & academic institutions, and federal government agencies. Drupal has seen a rise in popularity and interest lately due to its brand new version release (Drupal 7) and the successful and well attended DrupalCon 2011 Chicago. The Drupal community is already planning the next release, Drupal 8. There's lots of Drupal going on.

Kumar's book is geared towards Drupal 6 users who want to learn how Drupal themes are built; Drupal Web site managers and webmasters who want to customize their Drupal themes; and Drupal developers who are looking to bring their front-end development to the next level. Through easy-to-follow "recipe" style tutorials, the book teaches you how to implement basic, intermediate and advanced Drupal theming concepts, solutions and functionality. You learn how to tweak contributed Drupal starter themes as well as how to roll your own custom Drupal themes.

Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook expands the existing documentation on Drupal theming that's already provided both on drupal.org (Drupal 6 & 7 Theming Guides) and in other recent Drupal publications including Pro Drupal Development and Front End Drupal. Where those titles are exhaustive studies of front and back-end Drupal development, this book focuses purely on front-end theming and presents this in one comprehensive volume of examples and demos. Bear in mind that the book is focused on Drupal 6, however many of the concepts outlined in the book will be similar for Drupal 7 and can easily be applied to the latest Drupal version.

Each section presents sections of clear instructions divided by headers. These model headers flow through the entire book: Getting ready, How to do it, and How it works. Sections present bulleted list of instructions so you can easily follow along step-by-step. Screenshots are clear and the text flows smoothly. The click-able buttons and links in the Drupal administration screens that the author refers to are highlighted in bold to denote an action the reader needs to take.

The book starts out covering the basics of the Drupal theme system and shows us how to manipulate and configure Drupal themes via the internal Drupal site administration screens. Installing themes, uploading logos, favicons, adding slogans, user and administration enabled themes, and block content. New Drupal users will benefit from the overview of the Drupal admin screens and concepts like adding blocks to regions of a theme, and displaying blocks on specific pages of your site. For intermediate users, there are examples of adding PHP code into blocks to allow for specific functionality.

The author continues building up from theming basics. The author explains the anatomy of a Drupal theme explaining what page.tpl and theme.info files are and why they are important for themers. You get practice overriding a core Drupal theme by creating a sub-theme based on the core. This is a great method of introducing theming since you get writing some basic code but can easily leverage much of the theme code in a core Drupal theme such as Garland or Minnelli.

Recipes start showing more theme code and covers essential theming concepts like CSS optimization — this is timely considering that IE browser versions still only support a maximum number of style sheets, so when you theme and implement your CSS in Drupal 6 Web sites you'll need to take this into consideration.

As a bonus you learn how to write a custom Drupal module to hold theme overrides, so you're getting a good foundation and intro to Drupal module development in this book as well. The author shows us how to add a CSS file via the custom module using the drupal_add_css() function. This is a great way to introduce Drupal users to the Drupal API.

The author turns attention to building a custom theme using the Zen contributed theme as your starting point. The Zen theme bills itself as the "ultimate starter theme" for Drupal 6 sites. The author shows us how to configure a custom theme using the Zen starter theme code. Zen is actively maintained and in development for Drupal 6 (by members of Palantir and Lullabot) and there is a development version for Drupal 7. This theme is still a valid and recommended starting point for beginning, intermediate and advanced Drupal themers. Kumar covers using the Zen theme as a starter theme to build our own custom theme; adding background images via CSS; Adding conditional style sheets for IE; how to remove base theme configuration settings from the theme-settings.php file.

Chapter 4 starts getting into more intermediate and advanced level theming by showing us how to create custom template files. In this chapter you learn how to use and implement page.tpl.php; customize node types using template files, for example creating a node-story.tpl; overriding a specific node; using the Devel and Theme Developer modules; and overriding themes using Theme Developer module.

There are many details in here including using the theme developer module to view all template variables and candidate template names available to you. Specific recipes include:

• Overriding the Drupal user name with the user's real name either using custom code or via a the contributed module RealName.
• Changing the core site maintenance theme and override maintenance template so your site maintenance page uses your custom theme instead of the drupal default

The author covers best practices for development and debugging. The author shows us a large list of theming tips and tricks including:

• Using Firebug & Web Developer Extension
• Searching for Drupal functions via the Drupal API
• Executing PHP code with Devel module
• Adding debugging code in a custom module including dpm and dsm
• Editing CSS and HTML and validating CSS using Web Developer extension

The second half of the book (Chapters 6-12) covers advanced theming. Recipes include:

• Adding variables to node templates
• Adding preprocess function to remove search box and feed icons on the front page of the site
• Adding a preprocess function to template.php that hides all the theme regions; page title and the submission info on the front page of the site
• Using functions like format_interval to format the date and time on the site

The author shows how to use javascript with themes; and gives us recipes on manipulating the Drupal navigation system.

Since Drupal is largely built with forms and displays forms widely throughout it's administration screens, the recipes devoted to form design and theming are a wealth of info for themers. The author scopes out:

• The form API and how to use it
• Altering forms; locating form ID and using hook_form_alter()
• Modifying the default body element in node forms
• Disabling the javascript resizing of the body text box and using hook_form_alter to add specific # of rows and columns for the box
• Enabling and configuring the WYSIWYG module
• Reordering fields and form elements — for example moving the tag categories and the menu items below the body text area
• Overriding the node form Save and Preview buttons with an image icon vs. the default Drupal submit button.

The book covers CCK module related functionality. There's lots of information on image handling; the ImageCache module and integrating Lightbox modal windows here.

Detailed recipes on theming the trifecta modules are included, specifically dealing with Views theming and creating custom View template files and overriding the table style plugin using templates. The Views module is presented in detail — how to configure Views and display output using various Views plugin styles. Anyone using the Views module for the first time will get a lot out of these later sections.

The book concludes with a look at theming the trifecta modules, covering Panels module theming and overrides in depth.

With these concluding chapters on the CCK, Views and Panels modules, Kumar's book provides a perfect twin to the Miles' Building Blocks title. Both will help to teach Drupal theming and module configuration to a new generation of Drupal users, themers and developers.

Trevor James is a Drupal developer & themer based in Middletown, MD, USA. He has authored two books on Drupal."

You can purchase Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

srwellman writes "The practice of Web 'scraping' is growing as many firms offer to collect personal, and potentially incriminating, data about users from their social networking profiles and discussions. Many companies even collect online conversations and personal details from social networks, job sites and forums where people might discuss their lives and even potentially sensitive data, such as health issues. These scrapers operate in a legal grey area leaving many users exposed." We ban scrapers like this regularly here simply for not adhering to the rules spelled out in robots.txt.

Kamiza Ikioi writes "A lawsuit by Paul Ceglia contains never-before-seen emails from Mark Zuckerberg. The emails, if they prove to be real, could be the most damning evidence to date against Zuckerberg's business dealings in the time leading up to 'The Face Book' and just after. They paint a picture of a Zuckerberg more sinister than portrayed in the movie The Social Network, actively out to sucker his investors about the site, including Ceglia. FTA: 'Zuckerberg writes Ceglia an email telling him he's thinking of shutting down the Facebook site, because he's too busy to work on it and there's little interest in it among students. (This is while Facebook is growing like crazy). Ceglia gets really pissed off, and starts accusing Zuckerberg of pulling "criminal stunts."' Among the emails is one where Mark Zuckerberg agrees to split Facebook with Ceglia 50/50. If the emails are proven legitimate, Ceglia may own 50% of Facebook."

zaxios writes "Merck — the pharmaceutical giant previously featured on Slashdot for drawing up a 'hit list' of doctors that criticized its drug Vioxx, and creating a fake medical journal to endorse its products — is embroiled in a new scandal. USA Today is reporting on two new studies that show Propecia, Merck's $250 million prescription medication for baldness, can make men irreversibly impotent. Lawsuits have been filed in the United States and Canada from men claiming to have permanently lost their sexual function after taking the drug. All this is reminiscent of Merck's difficulties with Vioxx, a once $2.5-billion-a-year drug, which was withdrawn from the market in 2004 after a study showed it doubled the risk of heart attack and stroke in users."

Nemesisghost wrote to us with a story about attempts to reform the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Under the act, messages left on a server are considered abandoned after six months and are trivially subpoenaed by law enforcement. A group of ISPs is lobbying to extend the protections afforded to locally stored messages to messages stored on third party servers, but the Obama administration is urging Congress not to reform the law.

schleprock63 writes "Physicists at Fermi Lab have found a 'suspicious bump' in their data that could indicate they've found a new elementary particle or even a new force of nature. The discovery could 'be the most significant discovery in physics in half a century.' Physicists have ruled out that the particle could be the standard model Higgs boson, but theorize that it could be some new and unexpected version of the Higgs. This discovery comes as the Tevatron is slated to go offline sometime in September."

egalluzzo writes "Announced today, the AffirmIt! unit testing framework for Ruby eschews dismisses disses dispells the harsh, archaic notions of 'truth' and 'failure,' preferring instead to affirm your code. After all, who are they we Kelly the NRA to make value judgments about code that 'works' or 'doesn't work'? DHH announced earlier on Twitter that Rails plans to move to this new behavioral non-judgemental inclusive Wellesley evaluation framework in version 3.1."

frnic writes "Deutsche Telekom is tracking its customers' locations and saving the information: '.... as a German Green party politician, Malte Spitz, recently learned, we are already continually being tracked whether we volunteer to be or not. Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect, so Mr. Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts. The results were astounding. In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin. Mr. Spitz has provided a rare glimpse — an unprecedented one, privacy experts say — of what is being collected as we walk around with our phones."

BuzzSkyline writes "A group of physicists went AWOL from the American Physical Society conference in Dallas this week to explore the ruins of the nearby Superconducting Super Collider. The SSC was to be the world's largest and most ambitious physics experiment. It would have been bigger than the LHC and run at triple the energy. But the budget ran out of control and the project was scrapped in 1993."

RabidMonkey writes "Microsoft has managed to purchase 666,624 IP addresses from the bankrupt Canadian company Nortel for $7.5 million. This works out to $11.25/ip. An exact list of blocks isn't available yet. There has been a lot of discussion on NANOG about whether this allowed or not, and what the implications to the dwindling IPv4 pool may be. Is this the first of many such moves as IPv4 address space has run out? Will ARIN step in and block the sale/transfer? How long will such measures drag out the eventual necessity of IPv6?"

Foldarn writes "Recently on Slashdot, Utah's Governor was honored with the Blackhole Award. Governor Herbert has now released a statement and a meeting with a concrete date to repeal the opaque law from the books in an effort to stay in offi... err, restore confidence in the public. The law added time for lawmakers to respond to information requests, removed the number of items that can be requested, and increased the prices of those same items. It's currently scheduled to become law this summer."

DarkStarZumaBeach points out a frequently updated page from the International Atomic Energy Agency with updates on the situation at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant, which reports in terse but readable form details of the dangers and progress there. The most recent update says that the plant's Unit 2 has been re-wired for power, and engineers 'plan to reconnect power to unit 2 once the spraying of water on the unit 3 reactor building is completed.' Read on for more on the tsunami aftermath. Reader srwellman writes "A large plume of radioactive smoke is heading from Japan to the West Coast of the US. Officials claim the plume is not dangerous."

dooms13 suggests (by way of The Register) that the disaster in Fukushima is nonetheless a demonstrated triumph for nuclear safety: "If nuclear powerplants were merely as safe as they are advertised to be, there should have been a major failure right then. As the hot cores ceased to be cooled by the water which is used to extract power from them, control rods would have remained withdrawn and a runaway chain reaction could have ensued – probably resulting in the worst thing that can happen to a properly designed nuclear reactor: a core meltdown in which the superhot fuel rods actually melt and slag down the whole core into a blob of molten metal. In this case the only thing to do is seal up the containment and wait: no radiation disaster will take place, but the reactor is a total writeoff and cooling the core off will be difficult and take a long time. Eventual cleanup will be protracted and expensive."

Something to contemplate while the rescue effort continues: imscarr writes "The coastline of Japan has drastically changed since the earthquake & tsunami. New bays have formed and many areas are completely flooded. These interactive before-and-after images show you the magnitude of devastation. Other photos here."

Adds reader madcarrots: "The Laboratory of Applied Bioacoustics (LAB), a unit of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), directed by Professor Michel Andre, has recorded the sound of the earthquake that shook Japan on Friday, March 11. The recording, now available online, was provided by a network of underwater observatories belonging to the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) and located on either side of the earthquake epicenter, close to the Japanese island of Hatsushima."

DarkStarZumaBeach points out a frequently updated page from the International Atomic Energy Agency with updates on the situation at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant, which reports in terse but readable form details of the dangers and progress there. The most recent update says that the plant's Unit 2 has been re-wired for power, and engineers 'plan to reconnect power to unit 2 once the spraying of water on the unit 3 reactor building is completed.' Read on for more on the tsunami aftermath. Reader srwellman writes "A large plume of radioactive smoke is heading from Japan to the West Coast of the US. Officials claim the plume is not dangerous."

dooms13 suggests (by way of The Register) that the disaster in Fukushima is nonetheless a demonstrated triumph for nuclear safety: "If nuclear powerplants were merely as safe as they are advertised to be, there should have been a major failure right then. As the hot cores ceased to be cooled by the water which is used to extract power from them, control rods would have remained withdrawn and a runaway chain reaction could have ensued – probably resulting in the worst thing that can happen to a properly designed nuclear reactor: a core meltdown in which the superhot fuel rods actually melt and slag down the whole core into a blob of molten metal. In this case the only thing to do is seal up the containment and wait: no radiation disaster will take place, but the reactor is a total writeoff and cooling the core off will be difficult and take a long time. Eventual cleanup will be protracted and expensive."

Something to contemplate while the rescue effort continues: imscarr writes "The coastline of Japan has drastically changed since the earthquake & tsunami. New bays have formed and many areas are completely flooded. These interactive before-and-after images show you the magnitude of devastation. Other photos here."

Adds reader madcarrots: "The Laboratory of Applied Bioacoustics (LAB), a unit of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), directed by Professor Michel Andre, has recorded the sound of the earthquake that shook Japan on Friday, March 11. The recording, now available online, was provided by a network of underwater observatories belonging to the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) and located on either side of the earthquake epicenter, close to the Japanese island of Hatsushima."

FrankNFurter writes "Remember the video of Andrew Tait upgrading Windows from 1.0 to 7. He did another one — this time installing all major versions of IE from 1.0 to 9.0." He actually does some interesting packet sniffing to see why sites aren't rendering, and amusingly shows MSIE 1.0 getting a 93/100 on the acid test... pretty impressive considering it lacks JS and CSS.

ColoradoAuthor writes "The horrific earthquake and the ensuing tsunami in Japan have caused widespread damage to undersea communications, according to data collected by telecom industry sources. Initially, it was thought that the damage to the cables that connect Japan and Asia to each other and other parts of the world was limited, but new data shows the extent of the problems."