Slashdot Mirror

eldavojohn writes "China has banned all 2.3M members of its military from blogging — even personal, non-military blogs. From the announcement of the new regulation: 'Soldiers cannot open blogs on the Internet no matter (whether) he or she does it in the capacity of a soldier or not. The Internet is complicated and we should guard against online traps.' While the official word seems to not be translated to English yet, the same apparently goes for websites or homepages owned by soldiers; there is no indication as to whether or not this applies to sites like Facebook or Renren (which the USMC bans). Similarly, as of 2007, the US requires active duty soldiers to clear any posting with a superior officer, and Israel had to cancel an operation due to a Facebook status update. A military blog aggregating site claims only a few Chinese military blogs indexed, but it looks like as of June 15 that list may have shortened."

benoliver writes to let us know that the FBI has failed to decrypt files of a Brazilian banker accused of financial crimes by Brazilian law enforcement, after a year of attempts. Five hard drives were seized by federal police at the apartment of banker Daniel Dantas, in Rio de Janeiro, during Operation Satyagraha in July 2008. (The link is to a Google translation of the original article in Portuguese.) The article in English mentions two encryption programs, one Truecrypt and the other unnamed. 256-bit AES was used, and apparently both the Brazilian police and the FBI tried dictionary attacks against it. No Brazilian law exists to force Dantas to produce the password(s).

eldavojohn writes "Yesterday Reporters Without Borders (RSF) launched a new initiative called 'Anti-Censorship Shelter' that aims to provide shelter for bloggers and Internet journalists in foreign countries who risk persecution or censorship from their local governments. RSF stated, 'At a time when online filtering and surveillance is becoming more and more widespread, we are making an active commitment to an Internet that is unrestricted and accessible to all by providing the victims of censorship with the means of protecting their online information. Never before have there been so many netizens in prison in countries such as China, Vietnam, and Iran for expressing their views freely online. Anonymity is becoming more and more important for those who handle sensitive data.' Working with Xerobank, RSF has a high-speed, devoted VPN that users can connect to that sounds like an onion router. While RSF admitted this masked address service is not foolproof, it's impressive to see an organization proactively seeking out individuals and offering them a digital shelter to protect themselves from a fate similar to that of the estimated 120 imprisoned bloggers around the world."

eldavojohn writes "Back in May, China rolled out new laws requiring online mapping services to be 'certified' by the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping. The laws appear to go into effect this month. Today an AFP article outlines Google's consideration of these rules and notes that it's unlikely Google will meet the qualifications to become certified as all of its servers holding the mapping data are outside of China. The AFP also reported that 'Foreign firms wanting to provide mapping and surveying services in China are required to set up joint ventures or partnerships with local firms.' Unless large changes are made, Google's services might get a lot more stunted as China regulates onward."

eldavojohn writes "While the United States deals with oil on its southern shores, China faces hundreds of square kilometers of algal blooms headed toward its shores. One large 200 sq km blob is about 13 kilometers (eight miles) away from Jiaonan in Shandong province. In 2008, China employed 10,000 people to clean a similar algal bloom in order to keep its nearby shore pristine for the Olympics. China has had several case studies (PDF) done of its algal blooms, which many attribute to nutrient pollution in lakes and shores. An Alaskan blob also amounted to an algal bloom, while West Coast red tide algal blooms are making wild shellfish deadly to consume."

An anonymous reader writes "Spain's FBI equivalent has arrested the management of a software company (Google translation; Spanish original) for selling custom software to small and medium-sized businesses with 'controlled errors' that resulted in the software bombing on a predetermined date. They would then charge for fixing the problem and press the client into buying a maintenance contract. More than 1,000 clients were affected."

An anonymous reader writes "Google Voice is now open to anyone in the US, removing the need to search for an invite. At the Google Voice site, anyone with a US IP address and a US phone number can sign up for an account. Non-US IPs are blocked, and non-US-based phone numbers are prevented from attaching to Google Voice (with the single odd exception of the 403 area code of southern Alberta)." Good timing on the part of Frontier Communications Corp., which just filed a lawsuit claiming that the Google Voice feature connecting a user's home, work, and cell phone numbers to another number infringes one of their patents.

ThinkGeek, sister company to Slashdot, received a meticulously researched (except on one point) 12-page cease-and-desist letter from the National Pork Board. What had the meat lobbyists up in arms was an April Fools product from the TG catalog: Radiant Farms Canned Unicorn Meat, whose copy included the line "the new white meat." The NPB figured this was confusingly similar to their trademarked "the other white meat" (an advertising slogan the pork industry is considering retiring anyway). Geeknet, parent company of Thinkgeek and Slashdot, issued a press release apologizing for any confusion; you can read it on ThinkGeek's site (PDF), because the newswires refused to distribute it for some reason. Oh, and ThinkGeek has no intention of taking down the protected parody.

googlePLEXS writes "Google Wave is open to all users at wave.google.com, as a Google Labs product — no invitation needed. Google Apps administrators will also have the option to add Wave as a Labs feature for their domains, helping groups of people communicate and work together more productively." If you haven't played with it, it's worth your time just to try to think beyond the bounds of IRC/Email. It's not going to change your work flow, but I still think it's worth a bit of your time to see it.

A few days ago we noted how Ukraine is driving out its software freelancers with the threat of onerous taxation. Now comes news that another former Soviet republic, Georgia, will become a tax-free zone for IT companies. It might be the Google translation, but it seems that officials there are somewhat worried about how to categorize the IT segment: "[T]he main difficulty ... is to determine which organization is the IT company, and what is not: 'While from a formal point of view it is impossible to distinguish between software developers from the oil.'"

theodp writes "Among the tips Derek Sivers offers for how to hire a programmer to make your ideas happen is an intriguing one: hire more than one person to complete your first programming milestone, with the expectation that one will go bad, one will be so-so, and one will be great. 'Yes it means you're paying multiple times for this first milestone,' says Sivers, 'but it's worth it to find a good one.' It's not a new idea — the practice of pitting two different programmers against each other on the same task was noted three decades ago in Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine — but one that never gained widespread acceptance. Should the programming code-off be adopted as a software development best practice?"

clustro writes "Under the belief that terrorists are 'increasingly' recruiting US citizens, Department of Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano says that increased government monitoring of the Internet is necessary to thwart them. It is believed that Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Hassan and attempted Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad were inspired by radical Internet postings. Speaking at a meeting of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy, Napolitano said, 'We can significantly advance security without having a deleterious impact on individual rights in most instances. At the same time, there are situations where tradeoffs are inevitable.'"

Local ID10T writes "The AP reports on a system of voting, called 'cumulative voting,' which was just used under court order in Port Chester, NY. Under this system, voters can apportion their votes as they wish — all to one candidate, one to each candidate, or any combination. The system, which has been used in Alabama, Illinois, South Dakota, Texas, and New York, allows a political minority to gain representation if it organizes behind specific candidates. Courts are increasingly mandating cumulative voting when they deem it necessary to provide fair representation." Wikipedia notes that cumulative voting "was used to elect the Illinois House of Representatives from 1870 until its repeal in 1980," without saying why the system was abandoned.

m94mni writes "The European Parliament wants to monitor your Internet searches for child porn offenders, as previously reported. The declaration was adopted yesterday, and in an interview with the Swedish news outlet Europaportalen.se, the Italian MEP behind the declaration, Tiziano Motti, shares his views on the Internet and anonymity. In essence, Motti wants to completely eliminate anonymity on the Internet. 'Each upload of text, images, or video clips must be traceable by the authorities', says Motti. This is in line with the secretive UN initiative Q6/17, revealed two years ago." The doublespeak here seems to go beyond the imprecision of automated translation.

rtfa-troll writes "Beef Taco is a Firefox extension that allows a mass opt-out from tracking and targeted advertising by many ad networks. The Register reports that the original system, TACO, has become proprietary, and has added new 'features' best described as bloatware. I guess this should serve as a warning for users to always prefer software under a copyleft license where possible. If Google had chosen a license with better protection, such as the GPL, when it released its own opt-out tool, this problem would have been much less likely. This also shows why forks are so important when software development begins to get messy."

Earthquake Retrofit sends along a piece from The Register reporting on a nightmare scenario of legal jurisdiction on the Internet: a Pakistani lawyer has filed blasphemy charges, carrying the death penalty, against Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives (and the pseudonomous user who initiated the "Draw Muhammad" contest last month). Pakistani police have apparently opened an investigation, according to this Google translation of a BBC Urdu report."

An anonymous reader writes "According to the new tax law (Google translation; Russian original) that is being developed now and should take effect on January 1, 2011, it will not be possible for a private Ukrainian entrepreneur to provide any services to foreign companies without becoming a full-fledged company with a dedicated bookkeeper. Currently it is possible to perform such services and pay the equivalent of $25 in tax. Instead of raising the tax (which is overall welcomed by the community), the legislators plan to outlaw ISP, e-commerce, and Internet-based services — along with any services provided to foreign entities — for individual entrepreneurs. So starting in 2011, freelancers in Ukraine will have several choices: stop doing freelance work, start working illegally, become a full-fledged company subject to multiple cumbersome rules for taxation, or leave the country."

qubezz writes "World Cup soccer fans may think a hornet's nest has infiltrated their TVs. However the buzz that is the background soundtrack of the South African-hosted games comes from tens of thousands of plastic horns called vuvuzelas, that are South Africa's version of ringing cowbells or throwing rats. It looks like the horns won't be banned anytime soon though. A savvy German hacker, 'Tube,' discovered that the horn sound can be effectively filtered out by applying a couple of digital notch filters to the audio at the frequencies the horn produces (another summary in English). Now it looks like even broadcasters like the the BBC and others are considering using such filters on their broadcasts."

theodp writes "While conceding 'it is clear there should have been greater transparency about the collection of this [Wi-Fi] data,' Google asserted 'we have provided public descriptions of our location-based services' in its written response to Congress (PDF) about whether the public had been adequately informed of its data collection efforts. To prove its point, Google's how-many-times-do-we-have-to-tell-you answer included a link to a blog entry on My Location on the desktop, an odd choice considering that Google is still less-than-clear about exactly what's being captured by the service ('When My Location is active, Toolbar will automatically send local network information (including, but not limited to, visible WiFi access points)'). Congress might also want to evaluate the transparency of this cute Google video, which assured the public of Street View's privacy safeguards, but gave no hint of the controversial Wi-Fi collection."

An anonymous reader writes "New York Times standards editor Phil Corbett has had enough of his journalists' sloppy writing. Their offense? Using the 'inherently silly' word 'tweet' 18 times in the last month. In an internal memo obtained by theawl.com, he orders his writers to use alternatives, such as '"use Twitter" ... or "a Twitter update."' He admits that ' ... new technology terms sprout and spread faster than ever. And we don't want to seem paleolithic. But we favor established usage and ordinary words ...' After all, he points out, ' ... another service may elbow Twitter aside next year, and "tweet" may fade into oblivion.' Of course, it is also possible that social media sites will elbow paleolithic media into oblivion, and Mr. Corbett will no longer have to worry about word use." While this sounds like it could as well be an Onion story, the memo is being widely reported.

Apotekaren writes "The Finnish Ministry of Justice has started preparing changes to a current law that criminalizes using unsecured wireless hot spots (Google translation; Finnish original). The reasoning includes the impossibility of tracking unlawful use, the ease of securing networks, and the lack of real damage done by this activity. It is also hard for a user to know if an unsecured network is intended for public use or not. The increased ubiquity of legal, open networks in parks, airports, and other public places has also influenced this move by the Ministry of Justice."

NIN1385 writes "Google has scrapped the now infamous background image option on its homepage. After 14 hours of a scheduled 24-hour experiment to see how people liked (or disliked) the new homepage layout, the company must have found out it was very disliked. I guess the fact that 'remove Google background' was the seventh most searched for phrase today might have had something to do with it."

Gooseygoose writes with a link to this analysis by Boston University professor Cutler Cleveland. "Some reports in the media attempt to downplay the significance of the release of oil from the Deepwater Horizon accident by arguing that natural oil seeps release large volumes of oil to the ocean, so why worry? Let's look at the numbers." Read on for a few more stories on the topic of the Deepwater Horizon spill. theodp writes with some information on the remote-controlled efforts to stanch the oil's flow: "The work Tito Collasius does sounds a little like science fiction: Men on ships flicking joysticks that control robots the size of trucks as they rove miles beneath the sea in near-freezing depths no man could hope to reach. But BP's spill efforts rest in the hands of underwater remote-operated vehicle (ROV) pilots, who 'fly' the ROVs from command centers aboard ships, joysticks in hand and large banks of screens in front of them offering a view of the challenges they confront in the waters below. ROVs are typically used for commercial (as in the oil industry), oceanographic (science research and exploration), and military (mine reconnaissance and recovery) missions. If you're interested in joining Tito, training's available." Even if BP were to effect a perfect block for the oil, though, there's still quite a bit of it swirling in the Gulf — you've probably seen some gut-wrenching pictures of the affected wildlife. Reader grrlscientist writes "Some people claim that we should euthanize all oiled birds immediately upon recovering them. But I argue it is our ethical responsibility to protect, clean, and save these birds, even after they've been oiled, just as we should preserve and clean their habitats."

Kilrah_il writes "An Israeli company developed a gadget that measures your blood pressure and tells you when you are stressed and need to take a break from your computer. 'The user grasps two sensors shaped like computer mouses to measure the electric activity of the heart in minute detail. Software then combines the measurements with prerecorded personal details such as age and sex to calculate various indicators for stress and mood.' Looks like a must-have accessory for Slashdotters everywhere."

courteaudotbiz writes "In a court battle in the province of Quebec, Canada, initiated more than two years ago, free software activists Savoir Faire Linux (translated 'Linux know-how') won the right to submit offers (Google translation; original French version) when the government takes public requests for submissions to replace its desktop operating systems and office suites. This opens the possibility in the future of replacing Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office in favor of Linux and OpenOffice.org, or any other operating system and office productivity suite. In his judgment, the magistrate said that the government acted illegally when it discarded the proposal of Savoir Faire Linux for replacing Windows XP with a Linux distribution."

crimeandpunishment writes "Yahoo hopes to turn on a new sharing option without turning off its users. The company is trying to avoid the privacy backlash that has befallen Facebook and Google. It's advising its email account holders, all 280M of them, to review their privacy settings in advance of Yahoo's new features that will share users' online activities and interests with people in their address books, unless they take steps to prevent it."

theodp writes "While Google boasts one of its Privacy Principles is making the collection of personal information transparent, even techies are left guessing about what's going on behind the scenes of certain products. The American Dictator points out that Google's Wi-Fi collection efforts don't stop with its Street View cars, offering up this explanation of Google's My Location: 'When you allow Google to "know your location," what you are really agreeing to is to send to Google's computers your Wi-Fi environment — not only the name of the Wi-Fi hotspot you are logged into, but also the names and signal strengths of every Wi-Fi hotspot around you. In other words, the same things that those Google Street View cars were sucking up as they drove by your house.' So, will changes in privacy attitude prompt changes in Latitude?"

theodp writes "While Google boasts one of its Privacy Principles is making the collection of personal information transparent, even techies are left guessing about what's going on behind the scenes of certain products. The American Dictator points out that Google's Wi-Fi collection efforts don't stop with its Street View cars, offering up this explanation of Google's My Location: 'When you allow Google to "know your location," what you are really agreeing to is to send to Google's computers your Wi-Fi environment — not only the name of the Wi-Fi hotspot you are logged into, but also the names and signal strengths of every Wi-Fi hotspot around you. In other words, the same things that those Google Street View cars were sucking up as they drove by your house.' So, will changes in privacy attitude prompt changes in Latitude?"

theodp writes "While Google boasts one of its Privacy Principles is making the collection of personal information transparent, even techies are left guessing about what's going on behind the scenes of certain products. The American Dictator points out that Google's Wi-Fi collection efforts don't stop with its Street View cars, offering up this explanation of Google's My Location: 'When you allow Google to "know your location," what you are really agreeing to is to send to Google's computers your Wi-Fi environment — not only the name of the Wi-Fi hotspot you are logged into, but also the names and signal strengths of every Wi-Fi hotspot around you. In other words, the same things that those Google Street View cars were sucking up as they drove by your house.' So, will changes in privacy attitude prompt changes in Latitude?"

Reader awyeah notes a Financial Times report that Google is ditching the use of Windows internally. Some blogs have picked up the FT piece but so far there isn't any other independent reporting of the claim, which is based on comments from anonymous Googlers. One indication of possibly hasty reporting is the note that Google "employs more than 10,000 workers internationally," whereas it's easy enough to find official word that the total exceeds 20,000. "The directive to move to other operating systems began in earnest in January, after Google's Chinese operations were hacked, and could effectively end the use of Windows at Google. ... 'We're not doing any more Windows. It is a security effort,' said one Google employee. ... New hires are now given the option of using Apple's Mac computers or PCs running the Linux operating system. 'Linux is open source and we feel good about it,' said one employee. 'Microsoft we don't feel so good about.' ... Employees wanting to stay on Windows required clearance from 'quite senior levels,' one employee said. 'Getting a new Windows machine now requires CIO approval,' said another employee."

hackingbear writes "Workers at Taiwanese electronic outsourcing manufacturer Foxconn are getting a pay raise after a series of 13 suicides, including three in three consecutive days. According to an article by state-run newspaper China Daily, Apple concluded that the main cause of the suicides is low wages. (The media has also attributed the suicides to a variety of other factors — everything from the semi-military style of management, to long overtime, to China's one-child policy, and Foxconn paying too much compensation to the family of suicide workers, thereby encouraging copycat suicides.) Apple plans to subsidize raises using its own products (Google translation; Chinese original here) — the first one being the iPad. This would raise the outsourcing cost from 2.3% to 3% of the iPad's sales price. The article does not say the amount of the raise per worker, but it is rumored to be about 20%, according to other Chinese news sources."

crimeandpunishment writes "Cell phone companies are about to bombard us with advertising for the next big thing — 4G access. The first 4G phone, Sprint Nextel's EVO, comes out this week. But just how big a deal is 4G? Is it fast enough to warrant the hype, or are consumers better off waiting a while? AP technology writer Peter Svensson looks at the differences between 4G and 3G technologies."

An anonymous reader writes "The association of German magazine publishers has sent a letter to Steve Jobs (Google translation; German original here) demanding talks about censorship by Apple. The move draws attention to growing concerns about freedom of the press when a single unelected commercial entity has worldwide control over what gets published for the iPhone and, especially, the iPad." While the magazine publishers may rightly be concerned about private control of a platform that many of them are counting on for their long-term salvation, the German state is at the very least ambivalent about the subject of censorship. This is the country that has banned Wikileaks, sought a ban on violent games, and voted to censor child porn (only to have the president kill the ban as unconstituitonal).

crimeandpunishment and other readers noted the US government's increasing pressure on Facebook and Google. On Friday the head of the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers, sent the two companies a letter asking them to cooperate with any government inquiries. It's not clear exactly what purpose the letter served, other than to make Google's and Facebook's lawyers squirm a bit more than they already were, with Germany and courts and the FTC looking hard in their direction; Conyers did not say his committee will be holding hearings. The FTC just asked Google to hold onto the Wi-Fi data that it says it accidentally collected while snapping Street View photos. And in response to the growing outcry since its F8 conference last month, Facebook offered some simplified privacy controls — though opinions vary on how much the new controls simplify things for users.

The_PHP_Jedi writes "Alternative DNS services, such as OpenDNS and Google Public DNS, are used to bypass the sluggishness often associated with local ISP DNS servers. However, as more websites, particularly smaller ones, use content distribution networks via embedded ads, widgets, and other assets, the effectiveness of non-ISP DNS servers may be undermined. Why? Because CDNs rely on the location of a user's DNS server to determine the closest server with the hosted content. Sajal Kayan published a series of test results which demonstrates the difference, and also provided the Python script used so you can test which is the most effective DNS service for your own Internet connection."

almehdaaol writes "New military recruits are coming in physically heavier and out of shape, so the US Navy has decided to take an interesting course of action by creating a new training regimen inspired by the fitness-centric Wii Fit and Dance Dance Revolution." This comes alongside a report confirming some of the BS we told our parents when we were growing up: "Bavelier said playing the kill-or-be-killed games can improve peripheral vision and the ability to see objects at dusk, and the games can even be used to treat amblyopia, or lazy eye, a disorder characterized by indistinct vision in one eye. She said she believes the games can improve math performance and other brain tasks."

An anonymous reader writes "We all know that flash and other types of solid state storage can only endure a limited number of write cycles. The open source Flash Destroyer prototype explores that limit by writing and verifying a solid state storage chip until it dies. The total write-verify cycle count is shown on a display — watch a live video feed and guess when the first chip will die. This project was inspired by the inevitable comments about flash longevity on every Slashdot SSD story. Design files and source are available at Google Code."

ddfall writes "Four months after the release of version 4.0 for Windows, Google has announced the availability of Chrome 5.0 for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux — the first stable release to be available on all three major platforms. Chrome 5.0.375.55 is available to download from google.com/chrome. Users who currently have Chrome installed can use the built-in update function."

The folks at Rescue-Time, who make software that helps you (and companies) figure out how you spend your online time, did a modest calculation based on their user base and concluded that Google's playable PAC-MAN doodle cost the world over 4.8 million person-hours of productivity last Friday. "Google PAC-MAN consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6M daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day). $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, if the average Google user has a cost of $25/hr. (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate). For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 Google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get six weeks of their time." Also, Google made the doodle permanent.

CasualFriday writes "Mikolaj Kopernik, a.k.a. Nicolaus Copernicus, the 16th-century astronomer whose findings were condemned by the Roman Catholic Church as heretical, was reburied by Polish priests as a hero on Saturday, nearly 500 years after he was laid to rest in an unmarked grave. On Saturday, his remains were blessed with holy water by some of Poland's highest-ranking clerics before an honor guard ceremoniously carried his coffin through the imposing red brick cathedral and lowered it back into the same spot where part of his skull and other bones were found in 2005."

alphadogg writes "People who want to shield their use of Google's Web search engine from network snoops now have the option of encrypting the session with SSL protection. In the case of Google search, SSL will protect the transmission of search queries entered by users and the search results returned by Google servers. Google began rolling out the encrypted version of its Web search engine on Friday. 'We think users will appreciate this new option for searching. It's a helpful addition to users' online privacy and security, and we'll continue to add encryption support for more search offerings,' wrote Evan Roseman, a Google software engineer, in an official blog post."

FleaPlus writes "The Air Force is initiating a pathfinder program to develop a first-stage rocket booster capable of gliding back to a runway so it can be easily reused. Lockheed Martin has already launched a secretive prototype, and a Cal Poly team has a prototype based on Buzz Aldrin's Starcraft/StarBooster design (video). The Air Force estimates such a booster could cut launch costs by 50% over the current Atlas 5 and Delta 4 rockets, and could also offer a rapid surge/replacement capability if combined with reusable spacecraft like the recently launched X-37B. Initial test flights are planned for 2013."

theodp writes "If you're a mere mortal, don't be surprised if your first reaction to Google Storage for Developers is 'WTF?!' Offering the kind of 'user-friendly' API one might expect from a bunch of computer science Ph.D.s, Google Storage even manages to overcomplicate the simple act of copying files. Which raises the question: Are Googlers with 'world-class programming skills' capable of producing straightforward, simple-to-use programming interfaces for ordinary humans?"

theodp writes "If you're a mere mortal, don't be surprised if your first reaction to Google Storage for Developers is 'WTF?!' Offering the kind of 'user-friendly' API one might expect from a bunch of computer science Ph.D.s, Google Storage even manages to overcomplicate the simple act of copying files. Which raises the question: Are Googlers with 'world-class programming skills' capable of producing straightforward, simple-to-use programming interfaces for ordinary humans?"

theodp writes "If you're a mere mortal, don't be surprised if your first reaction to Google Storage for Developers is 'WTF?!' Offering the kind of 'user-friendly' API one might expect from a bunch of computer science Ph.D.s, Google Storage even manages to overcomplicate the simple act of copying files. Which raises the question: Are Googlers with 'world-class programming skills' capable of producing straightforward, simple-to-use programming interfaces for ordinary humans?"

databuff writes "Google has released a data prediction API. The service helps users leverage historical data to make predictions that can guide real-time decisions. According to Google, the API can be used for prediction tasks ranging from product recommendations to churn analysis (predicting which customers are likely to switch to another provider). The API involves three simple steps: upload the data, train the model, then generate predictions. The API is currently available on an invitation-only basis." Google also recently announced several other API additions, including Buzz, Fonts, and Storage.

mikael_j writes "This morning the German ISP that had been hosting The Pirate Bay's website and search engine shut the site down. A few hours later the website was back up, this time with hosting provided by the Swedish Pirate Party, which issued a press release (in Swedish) explaining why they have chosen to host The Pirate Bay."

theodp writes "Holy Logan's Run, Batman! Google on Friday began giving students priority access to its Google Voice service, which has remained in a closed beta since its transition from GrandCentral in March of last year. Typically, invites for the service can take anywhere from a few hours to several months to arrive after a user signs up. But Google is now promising students who cough up an .edu e-mail address access to the service within 24 hours. Good thing CMU closes e-mail accounts after graduation, or old fuddy-duddy alums like Brian Reid might try to sneak in!"

RabbitWho writes "Last week Google launched a redesign of its search results page, and is now introducing some changes to the content of its results too. The company says it will directly answer 'millions of different fact-seeking searches' with short answers at the top of its results. Search for 'Catherine Zeta-Jones date of birth', for instance, and the date shows up at the top, along with where Google is pulling the information from. Google says the feature is based on Google Squared, the experimental search tool it rolled out a year ago that gathers facts from the around the Web and presents them in an organized way. "

NoMoreHelio writes "The political blog ThinkProgress lays out big telecom's plan to attack net neutality. The blog obtained a secret PowerPoint presentation from a telecommunications industry front group (PPT) that outlines the industry strategy for defending against regulatory attempts by the FCC. The industry plans to partner with two conservative 'astroturfing' groups, best known for their work seeding the Tea Party movement. Today's revelation from ThinkProgress comes as Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) joined various telecom-funded front groups to unveil an anti-net neutrality bill."