Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes "For the IDF keynote, Intel showed an experimental processor that is solar powered (incandescent light shining on a solar panel). The whole computer itself still runs on regular power; only the processor itself is solar. From the article: 'The concept processor, code-named Claremont, can run light workloads on solar power by dropping energy consumption to under 10 milliwatts, said Justin Rattner, chief technology officer at Intel, during a keynote address at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. That is low enough to keep a chip running on a solar cell the size of a stamp.'"

theodp writes "Someday soon, Google will allow owners of Wi-Fi access points to opt out of a Google service that uses their data to determine the location of others' smartphones. The opt-out service will be available globally, although it was created at the instigation of European privacy regulators, Google Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer explained in a blog post."

Joining the ranks of accepted submitters, Zibodiz writes with an article in PC World about Cisco restructuring. From the article: "Cisco Systems emerged from 150 days of restructuring on Tuesday ... The networking company started to streamline its operations and refocus itself on a few core businesses earlier this year after posting disappointing financial results. The subsequent restructuring shut down its Flip consumer camcorder unit and other businesses and eliminated 12,900 jobs, with almost 23,000 employees moved in the process. Executives laid out some more details on Tuesday at Cisco's annual financial analyst conference in San Jose, California. Cisco's five areas of focus now are its core routing and switching business, collaboration, data-center virtualization, video, and tying these elements together in an overall architecture." Zibodiz further writes "Perhaps the most interesting thing to me is that Cisco had 12,900 employees that were doing things other than 'routing and switching, collaboration, virtualization, video, and ... architecture.'"

Craig Mundie may want a driver's license for the Internet, but Korea has actually implemented something of that kind. And, as first-time accepted submitter Pseudonym Authority writes, in the form of an excerpt from PC World: "Google has disabled user uploads and comments on the Korean version of its YouTube video portal in reaction to a new law that requires the real name of a contributor be listed along each contribution they make. The rules, part of a Cyber Defamation Law, came into effect on April 1 for all sites with over 100,000 unique visitors per day. It requires that users provide their real name and national ID card number."

With his first posted submission, ctusch writes "It seems Samsung has finally lost the battle against Apple in Germany. Today the district court in Düsseldorf ruled that Samsung must not sell its Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Germany. Furthermore, it has banned Samsung Germany from selling the Galaxy Tab 10.1 anywhere in Europe."

NicknamesAreStupid writes "As fast as you can say '$99 blowout sale,' PC World reports on an Android port to the now defunct HP TouchPad. 'Of course, it will turn out to be the best Android pad ever, making the iPad stink by comparison,' reports Muphy's Law Reports."

Hugh Pickens writes "According to an article by Tony Bradley, news is spreading quickly online that HP is going to clear out its vast TouchPad inventory by dropping the price to an offer you can't refuse. Rumor has it that beginning Saturday the 16Gb TouchPad will be $99, and the 32Gb TouchPad will be a measly $149. 'It is actually a fairly capable tablet. It's just not an iPad 2,' writes Bradley. 'For $500 it was a joke. For $300 it was still a shady deal. For $99 it's a steal.' HP has learned the hard way, and quickly pulled the plug on its tablet, proving that HP never had a solid tablet or mobile strategy and that it was really just looking for an excuse to get out. 'The reality is that my Best Buy is swimming in unsold HP TouchPad inventory,' adds Bradley. 'I went out tonight and picked mine up at the regular $400 price to beat the rush. Situations like this are why they invented price matching. I can just go back with my receipt once the fire sale starts and get the price adjusted and the difference refunded.'"

An anonymous reader writes "The Dutch site webwereld.nl has found incorrect evidence submitted by Apple (Google translation of Dutch original) in the EU design-right case against Samsung. In the ex-parte case, a German judge recently issued a temporary injunction against the sale of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the whole EU except the Netherlands. The faulty evidence is a side-by-side picture of an iPad 2 and the Galaxy Tab. The Tab is scaled to fit the iPad2, and the aspect ratio is changed from 1.46 to 1.36, which more closely matches the iPad 2 aspect ratio of 1.3, according to webwereld.nl."

rennerik writes "A recent study of 100,000 people taking IQ tests compared the scores with which browser the person uses on a regular basis. On average, Internet Explorer users fared the worst, with IE6 users at the bottom of the pile and IE8 users performing slightly better. Firefox, Chrome and Safari fell in the middle with little difference between them. IE with Chrome Frame and Camino landed on top, along with Opera, whose users scored the highest"

An anonymous reader writes "Fonolo, a Toronto based voice 2.0 company, helps you avoid those annoying company phone menus by letting you skip ahead in the company phone system using a process they call 'deep-dialing.' Just search for the company on their website (apparently they have over 500), and you'll see a visual representation of the company's phone system. Then you just select the option you want, put your phone number in, and Fonolo calls the company on your behalf and dials you back when the agent is available — for free. They have a business product that provides this same service (visual dialing), plus virtual queuing and data pass-through." One company creates a phone system designed to encourage you to hang up to save them money. Another creates a phone system designed to make it easy to stay on hold indefinitely. I wonder where this ends.

An anonymous reader writes "Google has released a passive in-the-browser reconnaissance plugin, called the 'DOM Snitch'. By intercepting JavaScript calls to the browser infrastructure, it detects common cross-site scripting, mixed content and insecure DOM changes. The plugin displays the DOM modifications in real time so developers don't have to pause the application to run an outside debugger. It exports traces for easier collaboration and analysis."

olsmeister writes "A Bitcoin user allegedly has had $500,000 worth of Bitcoins stolen from him. A hacker supposedly gained access to the user's home computer and managed to get the user's wallet.dat file, which contained the cryptographic keys that allowed him to drain the user's balance."

An anonymous reader writes "Steve Jobs' life and career is to be imortalised in a comic book biography. "Steve Jobs: Co-Founder of Apple" appears to describe his life from birth to the current day. Jobs notoriously hates biographies, so it'll be interesting to see how he responds to this one."

fysdt writes "Cookies are a pretty awesome treat, but sometimes making them from scratch can be a bit of a chore. Fortunately, there is now a robot created to specifically bake cookies--although it probably isn't good enough to replace human kitchen staff or grandma just yet. Created by MIT Lab student Mario Bollini, the PR2 Bakebot loves nothing more than to bake up a batch of cookies from scratch. The robot's left hand holds onto the mixing bowl, while its right hand does the hard work, mixing ingredients with a rubber spatula. Its head contains a laser scanner and sensor camera used to determine what each ingredients is and how much mixing and stirring it needs to do."

BogenDorpher writes "Verizon will be eliminating its unlimited smartphone data plan this summer. No longer will one be able to pay $30 a month to have unlimited data. This move is designed to 'force heavy data users to pay more for mobile data.'"

An anonymous reader writes with a PC World article, according to which "The Pirate Bay is unavailable for customers of Comcast, even as the torrent site remains online for other users. Problems began early Thursday morning, when several Comcast users told TorrentFreak that they were having issues with The Pirate Bay. Commenters at Techland and Engadget are confirming that they can't access the site." Right now, I'm on a Comcast connection in Pennsylvania, and get an "Ooops, could not connect" message when I try to reach The Pirate Bay.

An anonymous reader writes "Much has been written about the recent EC2/EBS outage, but Keir Thomas at PC World has a different take: it's shown how much cutting-edge Internet infrastructure relies on Amazon, and we should be grateful. Quoting: 'Amazon is a personification of the spirit of the Internet, which is one of true democracy, access to the means of distribution, and rapid evolution.'" An article at O'Reilly comes to a similarly positive conclusion from a different angle.

WrongSizeGlass writes "PCWorld has an article on Kohler's new hi-tech toilet. The Numi comes complete with a detachable touch screen remote; motion-activated lid and seat; integrated air dryer; a heated seat; feet warmers; ambient lighting; built-in speakers with FM radio and an MP3 player input jack. If you have $6,300 to flush down the drain on a toilet this is for you."

Back in January, we discussed news that Verizon had filed an appeal to the FCC's net neutrality rules, saying the regulatory agency did not have the legal authority to enforce the mandate. Now, reader olsmeister follows up with this quote from PC World: "An appeals court Monday dismissed Verizon's challenge of the US Federal Communications Commission's December net neutrality ruling, calling it premature. A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia noted in its decision that the FCC's net neutrality order is a rule-making document subject to judicial review once it is published in the Federal Register. The panel said that the appeal's 'prematurity is incurable.'"

c0lo writes "Right after rumors that Google was preparing to take on iTunes service with a digital music store of its own, Amazon has announced that it's entering the fight with a cloud-based music service of its own. From the article: 'Amazon Cloud Drive is a "personal disk drive in the cloud," while Amazon Cloud Player is, well, a Web-based music player. That's right--Amazon Cloud Drive will be something like Google's rumored digital music locker, a cloud-based storage system for all of your tunes.'"

unassimilatible writes "A Samsung ad campaign for the latest Galaxy Tab is misleading, to say the least. Actors pretending to be real people in fake interviews in a fake magazine misquoting a bad first-gen Galaxy tab review, are exposed — by the actual review writer. Netizens 'are having fun pointing out other curious things about the interviews, such as the fact that "leading New York real-estate CEO Joseph Kolinski" raves about the 8.9-inch Galaxy Tab even though the only 8.9-inch Tabs that Samsung itself had on hand at CTIA were non-working models.' Kolinski is actually an actor, not a CEO, Jim."

Roblimo writes "Yes, we know tablets like the iPad are the wave of the future and that PCs and laptops are dead. But some of us see tablets as laptops with their keyboards missing and a few hundred bucks tacked onto the price."

loekessers writes "Breaking in to an encrypted router and using the WiFi connection is not an criminal offense, a Dutch court ruled. (Original article in Dutch; English translation.) WiFi hackers can not be prosecuted for breaching router security. The judge reasoned that the student didn't gain access to the computer connected to the router, but only used the router's internet connection. Under Dutch law, breaking into a computer is forbidden. A computer in The Netherlands is defined as a machine that is used for three things: the storage, processing and transmission of data. A router can therefore not be described as a computer because it is only used to transfer or process data and not for storing bits and bytes. Hacking a device that is no computer by law is not illegal, and can not be prosecuted, the court concluded. "

lothos writes "Pornography will have its own top-level domain, dot-XXX, the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers decided today." Ars Technica has a short but thoroughly-linked article tracing some of the long history (in Internet time) behind the push for .xxx. See also ICANN's announcement of the approval, and — for all the juicy details — the rationale behind the decision (PDF).

An anonymous reader writes "Since real-time ray tracing on a single desktop machine is still too slow for gaming, Intel has worked on a research project that puts the heavy workload up into the cloud, relying on multiple 32-core chips working together. That enables new special effects for games, like realistic reflections (e.g. on cars or the scope of a sniper rifle), glass simulations and multi-screen surveillance stations. The research paper also takes a closer look at various sources of latencies that become relevant in a cloud-based gaming approach."

Several readers have sent word that Motorola's Xoom tablet, marketed as the iPad's first significant competitor, won't ship with Flash support. Quoting: "Support for Adobe's Flash technology has been an argument for the Android operating system since Apple CEO Steve Jobs notoriously said that Flash is a dying technology and that it won't make it onto iOS devices for several reasons. Flash support appeared in Android with version 2.2 and Google even flaunted it as a killer feature for tablets running Honeycomb (3.0), like the Motorola Xoom. But it looks like Adobe and/or Google have yet to put the finishing touches on Flash's implementation in Android 3.0. An advertisement for the Xoom on Verizon's site says (in 6 point text at the bottom) that Adobe Flash support on the Xoom is expected in Spring 2011, meaning this functionality won't be available at the launch of the first Honeycomb tablet on February 24. Considering how slow carriers and manufacturers are when it comes to software updates, this Spring 2011 update could mean more like late Spring 2011 ETA."

c0lo writes with news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is lamenting the difficulty in executing wiretaps because of "web-based e-mail, social-networking and peer-to-peer services." "President Barack Obama's administration is debating ways to deal with Web-based services not covered by traditional wiretap laws, including incentives for companies to build in surveillance capabilities, said Valerie Caproni, general counsel at the FBI. Many Internet services are not covered by the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which requires traditional telecom carriers to allow law enforcement agencies real-time access to communications after a court has issued a wiretap order, she told members of a subcommittee of the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. But Caproni told lawmakers she was not asking for expanded CALEA powers. And she stopped short of calling for rules requiring Web-based communication providers to build in so-called back doors allowing law enforcement access to their software, although she said she's optimistic the US government can find incentives for companies to 'have intercept solutions engineered into their systems.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Over at PCWorld they're asking a simple but valid question: Are tablets just too expensive? They point out that, weight-for-weight, pure silver is cheaper than most tablets, and that, like jewelery, tablets are highly thievable. The worst thing might be that the nascent tablet platform gets written-off as a high-priced niche for people with more money than sense."

jfruhlinger writes "Android's popularity is growing, but its lack of enterprise security features is making IT departments pull their hair out. Two of the biggest Android vendors, Motorola and Samsung, aren't waiting for Google, but are building their own security functionality into the devices they sell. Motorola's version will be facilitated by their purchase of 3LM, an Android-centric mobile security provider that bases their strategy on Asimov's Three Laws or Robotics, though the order is tweaked: The device must protect the user, protect itself, and obey the user, in that order."

theodp writes "At the risk of pulling-a-Groupon, I have a dream that one day my children will not be judged by their e-readers, but by the content of their character. The NY Times' Virginia Heffernan complains that many indie New York City cafes now heavily restrict, or ban outright, the use of Kindles, Nooks and iPads. Evidently, she says, too many coffee shops have had their ambience wrecked when itinerant word processors with laptops turn the tables into office space. Full-dress computers are one thing, says Heffernan, but banning devices the size of books is going too far, and it's anathema to the character and history of cafes. By contrast, Starbucks offers free, one-click, unlimited wireless service to their patrons, making it in Heffernan's eyes 'a flawed franchise that is squarely in the public good.'"

Pickens writes "BBC reports that researchers have created software that gives images an expiration date by tagging them with an encrypted key so that once this date has passed the key stops the images being viewed and copied. Professor Michael Backes, who led development of the X-Pire system, says development work began about 18 months ago as potentially risky patterns of activity on social networks, such as Facebook, showed a pressing need for such a system. 'More and more people are publishing private data to the internet and it's clear that some things can go wrong if it stays there too long,' says Backes. The X-Pire software creates encrypted copies of images and asks those uploading them to give each one an expiration date. Viewing these images requires the free X-Pire browser add-on. When the viewer encounters an encrypted image it sends off a request for a key to unlock it. This key will only be sent, and the image become viewable, if the expiration date has not been passed."

burnin1965 writes in to let us know that the looming crisis in rare-earth materials (which we have discussed recently) has prompted Molycorp, the erstwhile operator of a California mine closed in 2002, to announce plans to reopen it. "With increasing prices on rare earth ore, tariffs raised by the Chinese government, and the threat of embargoes that would damage United States high-tech manufacturing Molycorp now has the needed incentive to reopen the California Mountain Pass mine. They will spend the capital needed to implement badly needed updates to environmental controls that will mitigate the radioactive waste water releases that plagued the mine in the past. Chinese imports in the 90s nearly halved ore prices and the California mine experienced multiple failures in environmental controls that resulted in the release of huge volumes of radioactive waste water. Updating the mine to address the environmental issues was not financially viable due to the cheap Chinese imports so it was closed in 2002." Within two years the mine could be producing 20% of the amount of rare earths we import from China.

In today's episode of As WikiLeaks Turns we learn that WikiLeaks's main web site is back up less than 10 days after EveryDNS terminated the domain name over stability concerns. A 16-year-old Dutch boy suspected of being involved in the pro-WikiLeaks attacks on MasterCard and Visa has been arrested. But Dutch teenagers aren't the only Assange fans in the news. Many top journalists in Australia have sent a letter(PDF) to Prime Minister Julia Gillard today to express their support of WikiLeaks. The Sydney Police have written their own letter however to organizers of a pro-WikiLeaks rally saying that the police oppose a planned demonstration. Finally, special correspondent for The Times, Alexi Mostrous and freelance reporter Heather Brooke were given permission by the judge in the Julian Assange trial to post Twitter updates about the proceedings.

Another day, another dozen WikiLeaks stories, several of which revolve around money. PayPal has given in to pressure to release WikiLeaks funds, though they still won't do further transactions. Mobile payment firm Xipwire is attempting to take PayPal's place. "We do think people should be able to make their own decisions as to who they donate to." PCWorld wonders if the WikiLeaks' money woes could lead to great adoption of Bitcoin, the peer-to-peer currency system we've discussed in the past. Meanwhile, Representative Ron Paul spoke in defense of WikiLeaks on the House floor Thursday, asking a number of questions, including, "Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on WikiLeaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?" The current uproar over WikiLeaks has prompted Paul Vixie to call for an end to the DDoS attacks and Vladimir Putin to break out a metaphor involving cows and hockey pucks.

Zaphod_85 writes "You may remember the New York Times story from a couple of weeks ago regarding Vitaly Borker, an online retailer intentionally harassing customers in order to gain linking points in Google's PageRank algorithm. Now, not only has Google altered their algorithm in order to prevent this tactic from being effective (Though according to Katherine Noyes at PCWorld, this tactic may never actually have been benefiting the website in the first place), Now Mr. Borker has the Feds to deal with. He is being charged with cyberstalking, wire fraud, mail fraud, and making interstate threats, and faces up to 50 years in prison if convicted on all counts. Given his disturbing behavior that brought about the charges, a federal judge has ordered he be held without bail while he awaits trial."

An anonymous reader writes "Netcraft posted two reports on the movement of the WikiLeaks website today. First the site was taken down by EveryDNS, who terminated the DNS provision for wikileaks.org. A few hours later, WikiLeaks moved to a Swiss domain (wikileaks.ch). Netcraft suggests this move could be because the wikileaks.org domain was registered with a US company, which could be influenced by the US government. The new wikileaks.ch site is hosted in Sweden, but redirects all of its traffic to France. Strangely, WikiLeaks has chosen to use EveryDNS again for their new domain." This follows Amazon's removal of WikiLeaks from their cloud hosting, which has the EFF and others worrying about free speech on the net as various hosting providers receive political pressure to censor certain content. Amazon claims their decision wasn't influenced by a government inquiry, while Tableau Software freely admits that a public request from Senator Joe Lieberman prompted them to take down WikiLeaks data visualizations.

iONiUM sends in news of an early glimpse at Acer's upcoming Iconia laptop, on which they've replaced the keyboard area with a second 14" display that accepts multi-touch input. "The upright display acts as the primary display, while the display that remains parallel with the surface generally serves as a navigation panel, alternatively displaying a roomy on-screen keyboard, a touch-wheel and other on-screen touch controls, or even an extension of what's displayed on the primary display. The latter option effectively provides a dual-monitor mobile device for presentations or studying complex spreadsheets across both monitors, or viewing one document in one monitor, and another on the second monitor. The two monitors make the Iconia a hefty device — at 6.1 pounds it's unlikely to be the device you throw in your bag for your commute." Engadget has some pictures and a video of the device.

MMacFadden writes "The Google Wave team has officially submitted the open source version of Wave to the Apache Software Foundation as a candidate Incubator project. Google hopes that the wave technology will continue to grow, supported by the new open source community (which is made up of Google and non-Google employees alike). Here is the proposal itself."

An anonymous reader writes "On PC World's blog, Keir Thomas suggests reasons why tablets have never taken off in business, and explains how Apple's iPad was able to waltz in and steal the entire market. It's all about giving users freedom to figure out how useful tablets can be, he says, rather than forcing them into narrow usage scenarios: 'There's a lot to be said for having faith in users to make best use of their computer, without pushing and pulling them in ways you think are best for them.'"

Shortly after the launch of Google TV, it became clear that several networks and services were blocking access. Reader padarjohn points out a blog post from Lauren Weinstein explaining the blocking mechanisms being used and wondering why it's being tolerated. "Imagine the protests that would ensue if Internet services arbitrarily blocked video only to Internet Explorer or Firefox browsers! Or if Hulu and the other networks decided they'd refuse to stream video to HP and Dell computers because those manufacturers hadn't made deals with the services to the latter's liking." Various workarounds are being used to get around the blocks.

snydeq writes "T-Mobile has officially joined Sprint in pushing the promise of '4G' mobile services on consumers, despite the fact that, according to the ITU standards body, neither carriers' offerings constitute 4G mobile technology. In Sprint's defense, it has been advertising its WiMax-covered areas as 4G for nearly a year — technically not a lie because until last month 4G didn't mean anything, InfoWorld's Galen Gruman reports. But now that the ITU has provided a standard against which the FCC and FTC can judge truth in advertising, T-Mobile's new 4G ad campaign is a 'bald-faced lie,' Gruman writes." National ad campaigns take more than a month to coordinate, though — if the term was basically free-floating until last month (with quite a few candidate standards over the years), it seems hard to condemn companies too harshly for using a marketing catch-phrase.

sholto writes "One laptop per child is so last year. Private secondary schools in New South Wales, Australia are in discussions to upgrade their wireless networks so they can handle the strain of supporting a two-to-one ratio — a laptop and tablet for every student."

Velcroman1 writes "Barnes & Noble may kick off a fresh price war today for digital book readers, with its new Nook news. But the real news in digital publishing is a novel approach to the e-books themselves: Free books — with advertising. The basic idea is to offer publishers another way to reach readers and to give readers the chance to try more books — books that perhaps they wouldn't normally peruse if they had to pay more for them. Initially, Wowio specialized in offering digital versions of comic books and graphic novels, usually formatted as Adobe PDFs. So it was a natural step for the company to offer graphic ads that are inserted in e-books. 'We think we're creating a broader audience for some of these titles,' Wowio's CEO Brian Altounian told me. 'I think folks are going to download more books because they're saving the costs' of having to drive to the store or pay more for them. Would ads stop you from reading?" The new color Nook goes for $249, and comes with a browser, games, Quickoffice, streaming music via Pandora, and an SDK; reader itwbennett links to an analysis of how well it stacks up as a tablet.

digitaldc writes with this quote from PCWorld: "It kills me to say this: The dream of Linux as a major desktop OS is now pretty much dead. Despite phenomenal security and stability — and amazing strides in usability, performance, and compatibility — Linux simply isn't catching on with desktop users. And if there ever was a chance for desktop Linux to succeed, that ship has long since sunk. ... Ultimately, Linux is doomed on the desktop because of a critical lack of content. And that lack of content owes its existence to two key factors: the fragmentation of the Linux platform, and the fierce ideology of the open-source community at large."

tuXx writes "On Thursday, Canonical rolled out the official release candidate of its upcoming Ubuntu OS version 10.10, codenamed Maverick Meerkat. The release announcement has a feature list, and a review of the RC is up at ITWorld. It's available for download at the Ubuntu wiki site. If all goes well, the stable release is planned for Oct. 10th."

An anonymous reader writes "Facebook officially gave out more technical details on the endless loop in a database control mechanism that forced a 2.5-hour shutdown of the social site, and the resulting combination of a productivity burst, increased fertility (check back on June 25, 2011) and mass hysteria all around the world."

Phil_at_EvilNET writes "Jeff Bertolucci of PC World reports: 'Thousands of Facebook users this afternoon (US Pacific Time) are reporting that the popular social networking site is down. It's unclear when the outage began. PCWorld has not been able to reach Facebook for comment, but Mashable reports the company has confirmed the outage.'"

yuna49 writes "Analysis of the Stuxnet worm suggests its target might have been Iran's nuclear program. "Last week Ralph Langner, a well-respected expert on industrial systems security, published an analysis of the Stuxnet worm, which targets Siemens software systems, and suggested that it may have been used to sabotage Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor. A Siemens expert, Langner simulated a Siemens industrial network and then analyzed the worm's attack. Experts had first thought that Stuxnet was written to steal industrial secrets, but Langner found something quite different. The worm actually looks for very specific Siemens settings — a kind of fingerprint that tells it that it has been installed on a very specific Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) device — and then it injects its own code into that system."

snydeq writes "A DefCon contest that invites contestants to trick employees at 30 US corporations into revealing not-so-sensitive data has rattled nerves at the FBI. Chris Hadnagy, who is organizing the contest, also noted concerns from the financial industry, which fears hackers will target personal information. The contest will run for three days, with participants attempting to unearth data from an undisclosed list of about 30 US companies. The contest will take place in a room in the Riviera hotel in Las Vegas furnished with a soundproof booth and a speaker, so an audience can hear the contestants call companies and try to weasel out what data they can get from unwitting employees." The group organizing the contest has established a strict set of rules to ensure participants don't violate any laws. Update: 07/31 04:45 GMT by S : PCWorld has coverage of one of the day's more successful attacks.

joabj writes "Now that Facebook has amassed more than 500 million users, a growing number of open source social networking developers are wondering if Facebook's photo sharing, status updates and other features wouldn't work better as Internet-wide standardized services. At the OSCON conference last week, the head of Identi.ca, an open source Twitter-like microblogging service, likened today's social networking services to the enormously proprietary online services of the early 1990s, like AOL or Prodigy. He suggested that just like SMTP and Sendmail standardized what were previously propriety e-mail services, so too could open source social networking stacks, like OStatus, render walled garden services like Facebook obsolete."