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J. Dzhugashvili writes "We've seen some solid-state drives on PCI Express cards before, but OCZ's RevoDrive Hybrid may very well be the first solution to combine solid-state storage and a mechanical hard drive on a single PCI Express x4 card. Using Dataplex caching software from Nvelo, the RevoDrive Hybrid uses its solid-state component (a RAID 0 array of SandForce-based SSDs) as a cache for an onboard mechanical hard drive. The caching scheme is reportedly so effective that "a 5,400-RPM drive can be used without sacrificing much performance," according to The Tech Report's coverage. OCZ hasn't hashed out all of the details yet, but it expects the RevoDrive Hybrid to start at $350 this July. The base configuration should couple 60GB of solid-state storage with a 500GB mechanical drive."

Compared to their dumber e-ink cousins, tablets with LCD screens suffer at least two notable disadvantages: their batteries last hours or days, rather than weeks (or months), and they're notoriously hard to read in the sunshine. Neither of these problems are likely to be licked soon, but the gap may be shrinking: Mary Lou Jepsen's OLPC spinoff Pixel Qi has now shown off a 10", 1280x800 panel. Pixel Qi's screens are well-known, though not currently widely adopted, for their ability to run in a high-contrast, low-power greyscale mode as well as a still-frugal color mode. Though the company is currently showing prototypes rather than a shipping version of the new high-resolution screens, it's reason to renew hope for a long-lived color-screen tablet that's comfortable in the sunlight.

Last week you asked some questions of musician and programmer Jonathan Coulton. He's answered your inquiries about the music industry, video games, and being an ex-code monkey. Read below to see what he had to say. Have You Been Approached by a Label?
eldavojohn (898314)

Some current stars have made a career out of much less than what you have simply by signing a record deal with a label. Your song "Still Alive" from the Portal Soundtrack could easily have some filler phoned in around it for a 10 track album. Have you ever been approached by a major record label with a multi-million dollar signing? If not, what would be your response to such a proposal? Since you've already experienced success, would you admit to a point in your career when you would have been vulnerable to such an offer? Have you considered throwing your lot in with an independent record label? There are hundreds in Brooklyn, what stops you from joining one or forming your own to foster more artists like yourself?"

Jonathan: I've had a couple of conversations with label people over the years. There are a couple of things that have kept it from working out. To get a label deal, you sort of need to prove that you can make money - nobody's going to give an artist a multiple-million dollar advance unless they're pretty certain that artist is going to make much more than that. My issue is always, I have proven that I can make money, BY MAKING MONEY. So now what? Admittedly, there are some things that a label can do that I can't. I don't dispute that the right artist on the right label can, even these days, still be taken to a higher level, get more exposure, make more money. But one of the first things everybody wants is a large chunk of my digital, and most of my income is digital, and that is the very last thing I need help with. If they want 50% of my digital, to make that worth my while, they'd have to more than double that part of the business. And maybe they can, but it's a big gamble for me, especially since I'm pretty comfortable where I am.

I'm not anti-label, I think there are great people working in labels, and there are plenty of really useful things they can still do for artists under the right circumstances. Just haven't found the right situation for me yet. And maybe someday I'll form one, or some other kind of company that helps artists do stuff, but at the moment I'd rather be a professional rock star.


Creative Commons
SarekOfVulcan (133772)

You've released some (all?) of your music under the CC-BY-NC license. What are some of the coolest things you've seen done by other people with your songs?

Jonathan: My favorite of the moment is the kinetic typography video that Jared Heather made:. It's just an incredible piece of work. The theater department at Boston College created and staged a musical called Code Monkey made up of a lot of my songs, that was kind of awe inspiring to watch. A guy named Spiff makes great World of Warcraft music videos for my songs (and other people's songs). And recently I was listening again to a remix of Code Monkey done by Kristen Shirts. She won a remix contest with a version that I liked so much, it changed the way I play the song live . It also led to her playing ukulele at shows with me a few times. There are a lot of others I'm forgetting now I'm sure.


Fan Videos
YouTube is full of fan-made videos. Your fans seem to make an extraordinary amount of them. How do you feel about them and do you have favorites, or are they like your children? You love them all equally.

Jonathan: See above. I absolutely have favorites, but I'm moved by even the crappiest ones - there's something very stirring about knowing that someone spent an enormous amount of time making these things. Anytime something I made inspires someone to make something else, it feels like a huge victory for us humans. That's what art is all about for me, that's what creativity is - a huge, complex inspiration cycle that elevates us above our short, dumb lives here on Earth.


Any advice to us current code monkeys?
While the contents of "Code Monkey" probably shouldn't be taken as a sort of moral compass or serious life guidance, I can guarantee you there are people reading this on Slashdot who feel like "boring manager Rob" is their boss. Any advice for a current code monkey, who maybe doesn't have any other skills or internet-sensation status to fall back on? How does one deal with the pressures?

Jonathan: It's been several years since I was seriously in the software game, but I'd say even if you don't have any skills other than coding, there are still things you can do to take charge of your relationship with work. Make your own software for goodness sake, ever hear of the App Store? The thing about Code Monkey's story that I think resonates the most for people is how beaten down he is. He's trapped, but tragically, only by his own self doubt and inaction. I don't want to be the guy who just tells everyone how great their lives would be if they quit their jobs, but for many people there's less justification than ever before for staying in a work situation that isn't rewarding for you. If you want to do stuff, go and do stuff. Who is stopping you?


The State of Geek Culture
UberOogie (464002)

Joco, As some one whose career has pretty closely paralleled the "popularization" of geek culture (and perhaps benefited from it), how do you feel on the subject?There seems to be a strong divide amongst nerds about public acceptance of larger swaths of what are traditionally "outcast" culture, and not a little bit of backlash against it (a'la Patton Oswalt). As a nerd who can't help but benefit from the continuing popularization (and, perhaps bastardization) of nerd culture, what are your insights?

Jonathan: I think railing against cultural phenomena is kind of a waste of time. Dear Editor, the printing press is great but WHAT ABOUT SCRIBES AND THE DEATH OF SCRIBE CULTURE? If a cultural shift is big enough for everyone to be talking about it, then chances are it's already happened, and it makes no difference if you think it's good or bad. I'm not saying we shouldn't talk about these things, it's certainly interesting to watch how things change, but once you start arguing about what "nerd culture" "is", or whether all the new nerds are as good as the old nerds, you've maybe lost your way a little. You can say that nerd culture is different now in such and such a way, but saying that it's not cool anymore, or it's not outsider enough for you anymore is really just you talking about you. Nerd culture is what it is, and being a nerd means different things to different people. Let's not turn the things we love into exclusive clubs where you have to do and say and think the right things to belong. I mean, what are we, the cool kids?

I do agree with Patton Oswalt on at least one point though: referencing something old is not the same as making something new, and too often the former is used as a substitute for the latter. Go ahead and make references and mash stuff up, but please do it in a way that is interesting and meaningful. Better yet, think of something totally new. If the primary joke of your Brady Bunch reboot is "Ha! Remember Brady Bunch?" then you've failed.


Do you still write code sometimes?
TheSunborn (68004)

You used to work as a code monkey. Now that you don't have that job anymore, do you ever write code in your free time, or are you happy never to use a compiler again? ps: Are there any plans for rock band 3 pro mode guitar for some of your existing songs (Please :}

Jonathan: Every now and then I get to write code, and I still enjoy it. Right now I'm doing a little bit of work with PHP and MySQL to help build some pages that will let people book passage on JoCo Cruise Crazy II in 2012. It feels great to use those skills, and it engages my brain in a way that I don't experience with any other mental activity.

Rock Band 3: yes, on my list. Currently swamped finishing up this new album though, hopefully I'll have time to work on stuff like that this Fall.


Code Monkey
j33pn (1049772)

Code monkey, Did you ever hook-up with that receptionist?

Jonathan: That song was loosely autobiographical - my manager was not named Rob, he was actually a great boss, and I never had a crush on any of the receptionists in our office (sorry Mark, not even you). Actually, when I was first hired the receptionist was ME. I learned Access 95 in between answering phone calls.


Where Do You Do Your Recoding?
eldavojohn (898314)

You've released a number of studio albums, where are they recorded? Your own place? Do you have sound engineers or is it all DIY? If you have sound engineers, how do you reimburse them? How did you fund your setup if you use it yourself?Are things like an expensive mac hardware, isolation booths and Pro Tools a requirement to get decent sound quality or do you just wing it with whatever and some Sure microphones?

Jonathan: Up till this new album I've recorded everything at my home studio, really just a room in my apartment. The gear has evolved over the years, but it's mostly been a Digi 002 and Pro Tools LE on a Mac (mini, now iMac). You really don't need to much to get started. I never had an isolation booth for any of the music I've released so far. you can hear my cat, traffic, fans, and playgrounds in my source tracks. When I bought a bass guitar I literally asked them to point out the cheapest bass in the store. I've had a few microphones but never spent more than $3-400 on one. Like most people, I'd imagine, my ears and skills are a bigger problem than the weaknesses of whatever gear I'm using - if you don't know how to mix (guilty!) then the fidelity of your monitor speakers is the least of your worries.

This new album is a completely different experience - there's a producer (John Flansburgh from They Might Be Giants) and an engineer (Pat Dillett) and I'm paying for studio time and hiring professional players to play on it. I'm doing this because I'm tired of my imagination being beyond what I'm able to make happen, and I'm in the fortunate position of being able to pay for it myself. Obviously it's going to mean a smaller profit for me at the end of the day, but it feels great to be collaborating, and making things in a way where I don't have to compromise because I'm not personally good at something. I wanted to see what that was like (it's great).


Revenue Percentages
It's my understanding that if I buy music (in a store or online) that the musician only gets less than 10 cents out of every dollar. As a do it yourself act, what are your costs like in proportion to your revenues? I don't want to know how much you're making, I want to know the costs/revenues ratio. Say hello to Scarface for me.

Jonathan: CDs cost about a buck each. iTunes takes something like 30% and CDBaby takes another 9% out of every digital sale. Sales through my own digital store only cost me the standard Paypal rate (I use a micro payments account when it applies). Add to this various shipping costs for the physical things, some hosting and bandwidth. So it depends on the year and what proportion these things are of my income, but that should give you some sense how much better it is than 10 cents on the dollar. If you want to talk about the whole picture it gets complicated, there are a lot of other revenue streams and expenses, but overall I'm able to do things very cheaply compared to a label.


Best Video Game Song Ever?
N0Man74 (1620447)

Still Alive is considered by many to possibly be, "the best video game song ever." Were you surprised by the acclaim that it has received, and did that put any additional pressure on you while creating a song for Portal 2?

Jonathan: Yes to both. I don't think it's anywhere near my best song, so I was surprised when people went so nuts for it. We all were I think. There was a lot of pressure for the second one, but early on I made peace with the idea that it could never be as good as the first one. Even if it were a better song (whatever that means), the first one owed it's success to the game, the writers who made GLaDOS, Ellen McClain who voiced her, and most of all the element of surprise and wonder that made you feel like you were having a unique and moving experience at the end of that game. That part of it had nothing to do with me, so I knew there was nothing I could do to make it happen again.


My Question
imadoofus (233751) Where you promised cake for completing "Still Alive?" Did they deliver?

Jonathan:Yes and no.


Thing a Week Progress
greg1104

Your year of "Thing a Week" resulted in many great songs. With classics like "RE: Your Brains" on week 26 and "Code Money" on #29, from the outside and in retrospect it seems obvious you'd already reached serious momentum halfway through. Was this apparent to yourself, and did you ever consider ending the experiment early based on that progress? I think it's interesting to consider schedule vs. goal oriented development as something applicable to a self-improvement context.

Jonathan: Well, I had said a year, and bailing out would have felt like a failure. Right now is the 5-year anniversary of Thing a Week and I've been reblogging it in real time, writing about how it all felt at the time, how those songs sound to me now. It's very interesting to remind myself of the incredible ups and downs of that year - it took me until around week 25 to feel anything other than fear, self doubt, and despair. Looking back, it's obvious to me that I didn't actually get through to myself and really start writing until the halfway point, and in my opinion it's only the very last stretch of it when I started firing on all cylinders. I think the last dozen or so were the most consistently high quality songwriting I had ever done up to that point, which is interesting because that's when it was hurting the most to do it. For that reason alone I'm glad I kept going till the end.


Backstage Rider
There are many famous backstage riders out there, Van Halen demanding no brown M&Ms for example. Do you have any special backstage requirements, or are you content with Fritos, Tab, and Mountain Dew?

Jonathan: I used to have only one thing on my rider - a large bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos. Felt like I needed to put something on there. I had to change it though, because inevitably I'd end the tour with half eaten bags of Doritos in the car, in my suitcase, left in hotel rooms. Days would pass when I would eat nothing but Doritos, which sounds like a great idea until you do it. Now it's pretty standard: champagne, foie gras, white asparagus salad. And one bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos.

suraj.sun tips news that the Pentagon has decided computer sabotage originating from another country can be classified as an act of war. "The Pentagon's first formal cyber strategy, unclassified portions of which are expected to become public next month, represents an early attempt to grapple with a changing world in which a hacker could pose as significant a threat to US nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines as a hostile country's military." This news comes only days after the Chinese military admitted the existence of a team of cyberwarriors. "The report will also spark a debate over a range of sensitive issues the Pentagon left unaddressed, including whether the US can ever be certain about an attack's origin, and how to define when computer sabotage is serious enough to constitute an act of war. These questions have already been a topic of dispute within the military."

theodp writes "After reading the recent call for Steve Ballmer to step down, gdgt's Ryan Block concludes that it's time for Bill Gates to come back to Microsoft. 'I've long seen it as a foregone conclusion that Ballmer isn't the guy to be running what was until quite recently the world's preeminent technology company,' writes Block. 'The more pressing question is: who should replace him? I think we all know damn well who — but I'm not so sure he's available. Yet.' Block adds: 'I'm not saying Bill's going to leave his new gig as the world's greatest living philanthropist with aplomb, but the multi-billion dollar wheels at The Gates Foundation have been set in motion — and lest we all forget, the Foundation's endowment is tied directly to Microsoft's long-term success. It may just happen that Bill can help the Foundation more by securing Microsoft's future.'"

Hardhead_7 writes "Our recent discussion about how much your degree is worth got me thinking. I've been working in the IT field for several years now, but I don't have anything to my name other than an A+ certificate and vendor specific training (e.g., Dell certified). Now I'm looking to move up in the IT field, and I want some stuff on my resume to demonstrate to future employers that I know what I'm doing, enough that I can get in the door for an interview. So my question to Slashdot is this: What certifications are the most valuable and sought-after? What will impress potential employers and be most likely to help land a decent job for someone who doesn't have a degree, but knows how to troubleshoot and can do a bit of programming if needed?"

Hugh Pickens writes "The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that with tuition rising and a weak job market everyone seems to be debating the value of a college degree. Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, says talking about the bachelor's degree in general doesn't make a whole lot of sense, because its financial payoff is heavily affected by what that degree is in and which college it is from. For the first time, researchers analyzed earnings based on 171 college majors and the differences are striking: For workers whose highest degree is a bachelor's, median incomes ranged from $29,000 for counseling-psychology majors to $120,000 for petroleum-engineering majors but the data also revealed earnings differences within groups of similar majors. Within the category of business majors, for instance, business-economics majors had the highest median pay, $75,000 while business-hospitality management earned $50,000. The study concludes that while there is a lot of variation in earnings over a lifetime, all undergraduate majors are worth it, even taking into account the cost of college and lost earnings with the lifetime advantage ranging from $1,090,000 for Engineering majors to $241,000 for Education majors. 'The bottom line is that getting a degree matters, but what you take matters more,' (PDF) concludes Carnevale." Last week we learned that dropping out of college could earn you $100,000 in start-up money for your business.

miller60 writes "Just weeks after the opening of a Facebook data center in Prineville, Oregon, local officials say two more companies may build server farms in the small town. Facebook has touted Prineville as an ideal environment for using fresh air to cool servers. The news positions Prineville (pop. 10,000, unemployment rate 17 percent) to emerge as a data center hub similar to Quincy, Washington, a small farm town that now hosts five huge server farms."

theodp writes "Mayor Bloomberg's perception of money, opines Gothamist's Christopher Robbins, is somewhat different than most non-billionaires. Just hours before the leader in the city's $740 million CityTime web-based time and attendance boondoggle was arrested for allegedly taking $5M in kickbacks, Bloomberg said on his weekly radio program that 'we actually did a pretty good job here, in retrospect.' Overshooting the projected $68M it would cost, adds Robbins, 'pretty much sounds like the exact opposite of a 'pretty good job'.' A US Attorney said SAIC Project Manager Gerald Denault was charged with accepting more than $5M in kickbacks laundered through international shell companies while steering more than $450M of city funds to the tech company behind the kickbacks. In December, CityTime consultants were charged with stealing $80 million."

tekgoblin writes "The suit against Samsung that Apple filed back in April has been full of surprises recently; Apple even asked to see some of Samsung's future devices. Now, Samsung is requesting to view Apple's upcoming devices such as the iPad 3 and iPhone 5."

eldavojohn writes "Last year Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen filed suit against eleven tech companies citing patent infringement on four of his patents. Groklaw has followed up with some interesting documents that reveal three out of the four have already been granted a reexamination by the USPTO with the fourth still pending."

jcarr writes "According to Citi analyst Walter Pritchard, HTC is paying Microsoft $5 for each Android phone it makes. This may be related to a report from last year: MS and HTC sign patent deal. So now we can't even write a free OS?"

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."

A couple of weeks ago I scored a visit to Lucasfilm and half jokingly challenged the Slashdot audience to invite me to other cool places. Two brave Pixar employees took me up on my offer and showed me around for Slashdot T-Shirts. It's an amazing campus. Thanks to Mark Harrison and Ralph Gootee for showing me "0% of the render-farm" and making me wish that I was talented enough to have a place in such an amazing world. Soon I'll have a cool story to post about the crazy work Mark is doing with mind boggling volumes of data, but for now I have a picture of me next to a giant Luxo Lamp. Also thanks to Heidi Parmelee who gave me a Woody doll to give to my son and made me a hero. So now the gauntlet has been doubly thrown: Who out there in Slashdot-land works somewhere super cool and can give me a tour in exchange for a T-Shirt?

JR0cket writes "Scribus is an open source desktop publishing tool that helps you create professionally laid out documents, from simple documents to full blown magazines, corporate brochures or even books. Desktop publishing tools are not a replacement for word processors, instead they give you the freedom to create uniquely designed documents and help you manage large sets of text and graphic content. Scribus is similar to Adobe InDesign or Quark Xpress and gives you a wide range of tools to layout content in either print or digital media form. Scribus is pretty easy to get to grips with and has good documentation on the project website. The Scribus 1.3.5 beginners guide is a really handy guide through the workflow of desktop publishing and helps you clearly understand how to create professional looking results." Read below for the rest of JR0ket's review. Scribus 1.3.5 beginners guide author Cedric Gemy pages 348 publisher Packt Publishing rating 9/10 reviewer John Stevenson ISBN 978-1-84951-300-5 summary Create optimum page layouts for your documents using productive tools of Scribus. The book includes a simple comparison between Scribus and other desktop publsihing tools such as InDesign, Quark Express and Microsoft publisher, setting expectations clearly as to what you can get from Scribus and the kind of interoperability between desktop publishing tools (its a little limited, but the Scribus project is trying and is the most open).

The book begins by covering some theory behind desktop publishing, using the metaphor — What you see is what you mean — to get you thinking about the overal design that would appeal to your audience, whilst also considering the resource and media constraints you have. As with developing software, knowing the needs of your audience is an important factor in the layout of your documents. Knowing the limitations of what you can print out effectively or deliver as other media is an important set of constraints to consider.

An important concept to understand is the "graphic workflow" for desktop publishing. The first chapter therefore covers the use of Inkscape, Gimp and LibreOffice (open office) to create and manage your content (text and images) and then using Scribus to pull that content together in an appealing and productive layout. Also covered is the idea of using Inkscape as a tool for mock-up designs. I see Scribus as kind of the the big brother to Inkscape (review) in that Inkscape works with a single page document, whereas Scribus can manage content across a multiple page document. You can assemble some very intricate documents using Scribus that would take a lot of time and effort to do using Inkscape and word processors such as Libre office and Microsoft office.

Next is the overview of the Scribus workspace, including details of the menus and tool bars for which there are many. This overview is very easy to understand, especially for someone who has little or no experience. The coverage of the text, graphics and page layout options are very detailed and nicey sprinkled with mini-tutorials to help you get to grips with Scribus quickly. The first tutorial guides you through the creation of a simple business card, so you get a nice gentle start whilst still being practical.

Due to the good layout and extensive use of screenshots its easy for an advanced user to skip through to the parts of the workspace you want to learn about.

Once the Scribus workstation is covered, the book goes on to detail how to create your own layouts for desktop publishing using all the features of Scribus. Again you are guided step-by-step through the various options for choosing a document layout and managing the structure of your documents, using frames for importing and managing text and graphics, changing colours and styles, stacking and layers to manage the presentation, distorting shapes using resizing, rotating / scaling frames, alignment and distribution of objects. There are a lot of layout options in Scribus and the book does a good job of introducing each aspect. Again this is done using a step by step tutorial style and the odd pop-quiz that helps you quickly gain confidence with the tool.

There is good coverage of the how Scribus handles advanced colour features. Using shading, gradient fills, pattern fills and transparency of images and the use of layers, its shown how to create eye-catching effects to enhance your documents. Support for CMYK and colour profiles is covered when talking about profiling with the Argyll plugin for Scribus.

As printing documents is full of pitfalls, in part due to the wide range of printing hardware out there, there is a whole chapter on this topic. Scribus has a pre-flight verifier to check the quality of your document output and can give you a lot of information and highlight any errors in PDF generation. Using the print preview you can see examples of colour separation and ink coverage, all very important for print media. There is also some very useful information for book production, marks and bleeds, security for pdf's and all the various standards for pdf documents.

Overall the book gives a complete coverage of all the typical layout techniques you will need for your desktop publishing efforts the book. By the time you reach the end of the book you will know how to produce an Adobe portable document file (pdf) that is suitable for your print or online distribution.

Please note: Scribus has recently moved to a new file format its documents and the book referes to the Scribus version which uses this new file format. Documents created with older versions of Scribus are supported in all newer versions, but document created in 1.3.5 onwards are not backwards compatible. On Debian based system, both the older version of Scribus and newer version Scribus-NG can be run side by side.

The Scribus beginers guide book has a well presented layout with content nicely spaced through the books 348 pages, making it comfortable to read both in book and ebook form. Althought there is plenty of information online, the book is a great way to get started and give you confidence in your approach and use of Scribus, so you can make use of the reference materials online.

There are several books available for Scribus, however the Scribus 1.3.5 beginners guide is the most up to date, covering all the latest features of this evolving tool. This book makes a nice addition to the online reference documentation and the community resources available for Scribus.

John coaches Lean Agile practices, organises London technical communities and is an OSS advocate. @JR0cket

You can purchase Scribus 1.3.5: Beginner's Guide from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

JR0cket writes "Scribus is an open source desktop publishing tool that helps you create professionally laid out documents, from simple documents to full blown magazines, corporate brochures or even books. Desktop publishing tools are not a replacement for word processors, instead they give you the freedom to create uniquely designed documents and help you manage large sets of text and graphic content. Scribus is similar to Adobe InDesign or Quark Xpress and gives you a wide range of tools to layout content in either print or digital media form. Scribus is pretty easy to get to grips with and has good documentation on the project website. The Scribus 1.3.5 beginners guide is a really handy guide through the workflow of desktop publishing and helps you clearly understand how to create professional looking results." Read below for the rest of JR0ket's review. Scribus 1.3.5 beginners guide author Cedric Gemy pages 348 publisher Packt Publishing rating 9/10 reviewer John Stevenson ISBN 978-1-84951-300-5 summary Create optimum page layouts for your documents using productive tools of Scribus. The book includes a simple comparison between Scribus and other desktop publsihing tools such as InDesign, Quark Express and Microsoft publisher, setting expectations clearly as to what you can get from Scribus and the kind of interoperability between desktop publishing tools (its a little limited, but the Scribus project is trying and is the most open).

The book begins by covering some theory behind desktop publishing, using the metaphor — What you see is what you mean — to get you thinking about the overal design that would appeal to your audience, whilst also considering the resource and media constraints you have. As with developing software, knowing the needs of your audience is an important factor in the layout of your documents. Knowing the limitations of what you can print out effectively or deliver as other media is an important set of constraints to consider.

An important concept to understand is the "graphic workflow" for desktop publishing. The first chapter therefore covers the use of Inkscape, Gimp and LibreOffice (open office) to create and manage your content (text and images) and then using Scribus to pull that content together in an appealing and productive layout. Also covered is the idea of using Inkscape as a tool for mock-up designs. I see Scribus as kind of the the big brother to Inkscape (review) in that Inkscape works with a single page document, whereas Scribus can manage content across a multiple page document. You can assemble some very intricate documents using Scribus that would take a lot of time and effort to do using Inkscape and word processors such as Libre office and Microsoft office.

Next is the overview of the Scribus workspace, including details of the menus and tool bars for which there are many. This overview is very easy to understand, especially for someone who has little or no experience. The coverage of the text, graphics and page layout options are very detailed and nicey sprinkled with mini-tutorials to help you get to grips with Scribus quickly. The first tutorial guides you through the creation of a simple business card, so you get a nice gentle start whilst still being practical.

Due to the good layout and extensive use of screenshots its easy for an advanced user to skip through to the parts of the workspace you want to learn about.

Once the Scribus workstation is covered, the book goes on to detail how to create your own layouts for desktop publishing using all the features of Scribus. Again you are guided step-by-step through the various options for choosing a document layout and managing the structure of your documents, using frames for importing and managing text and graphics, changing colours and styles, stacking and layers to manage the presentation, distorting shapes using resizing, rotating / scaling frames, alignment and distribution of objects. There are a lot of layout options in Scribus and the book does a good job of introducing each aspect. Again this is done using a step by step tutorial style and the odd pop-quiz that helps you quickly gain confidence with the tool.

There is good coverage of the how Scribus handles advanced colour features. Using shading, gradient fills, pattern fills and transparency of images and the use of layers, its shown how to create eye-catching effects to enhance your documents. Support for CMYK and colour profiles is covered when talking about profiling with the Argyll plugin for Scribus.

As printing documents is full of pitfalls, in part due to the wide range of printing hardware out there, there is a whole chapter on this topic. Scribus has a pre-flight verifier to check the quality of your document output and can give you a lot of information and highlight any errors in PDF generation. Using the print preview you can see examples of colour separation and ink coverage, all very important for print media. There is also some very useful information for book production, marks and bleeds, security for pdf's and all the various standards for pdf documents.

Overall the book gives a complete coverage of all the typical layout techniques you will need for your desktop publishing efforts the book. By the time you reach the end of the book you will know how to produce an Adobe portable document file (pdf) that is suitable for your print or online distribution.

Please note: Scribus has recently moved to a new file format its documents and the book referes to the Scribus version which uses this new file format. Documents created with older versions of Scribus are supported in all newer versions, but document created in 1.3.5 onwards are not backwards compatible. On Debian based system, both the older version of Scribus and newer version Scribus-NG can be run side by side.

The Scribus beginers guide book has a well presented layout with content nicely spaced through the books 348 pages, making it comfortable to read both in book and ebook form. Althought there is plenty of information online, the book is a great way to get started and give you confidence in your approach and use of Scribus, so you can make use of the reference materials online.

There are several books available for Scribus, however the Scribus 1.3.5 beginners guide is the most up to date, covering all the latest features of this evolving tool. This book makes a nice addition to the online reference documentation and the community resources available for Scribus.

John coaches Lean Agile practices, organises London technical communities and is an OSS advocate. @JR0cket

You can purchase Scribus 1.3.5: Beginner's Guide from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

mcgrew writes "From LiveScience: 'Earthquake prediction can be a grave, and faulty science, and in the case of Italian seismologists who are being tried for the manslaughter of the people who died in the 2009 L'Aquila quake, it can have legal consequences.' A group of seven, including six seismologists and a government official, reportedly didn't alert the public ahead of time of the risk of the L'Aquila earthquake, which occurred on April 6 of that year, killing around 300 people, according to the US Geological Survey."

Slashdot regular contributor Bennett Haselton writes: "An anti-porn organization's Facebook page is disabled by Facebook, and then resurrected. Was the page the victim of a 'complaint mob,' and could the previously-discussed 'voting algorithm' have saved the page from being shut down?"

Speaking of Facebook pages being unjustly shut down, on Monday the anti-porn Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/PornHarms/, run by the non-profit Morality in Media, was abruptly disabled by Facebook. The page had 35,000 "likes" at the time the plug was pulled. Morality in Media CEO Patrick Trueman, who also ran the Facebook page, says he never received any warning from Facebook before the page was removed.

Some time on Wednesday, the page was restored. I had emailed a contact at Facebook to ask why the page was shut down, and he replied later to say that it had been deleted in error and the page had been restored. (He didn't say whether the page was on track to being restored anyway, or whether it would have remained down indefinitely if I hadn't pinged him.)

Facebook did not respond to inquiries as to why the page was removed, but as Evgeny Morozov has pointed out regarding political pages (and as many other users have heard from people's anecdotal experiences having pages pulled without explanation), it's common for pages on Facebook and YouTube to get removed that were almost certainly not violating those sites' Terms of Service. If enough users decide to file "abuse complaints" simultaneously against a piece of content on Facebook or YouTube, this has a good chance of getting the content removed, whether the complaints were legitimate or were simply part of an organized campaign of filing false complaints.

Meanwhile, I correspond with dozens of people every week on Facebook (usually people who use my proxy sites to get on Facebook at school or work), and about once a week I get an automated message from Facebook that says, "You have been sending harassing messages to other users," and goes on to sternly list the types of messages that violate Facebook's TOS. (Only twice has this resulted in my account actually getting locked, and it was unlocked after I bugged my friend at Facebook about it.)

I figure that these are either the result of users clicking "Report this message" accidentally, or parents hacking into their kids' accounts, reading their messages, and then trying to get the account shut down of the person who was talking their kid about proxy sites. In either case, I assume it's not the result of an "organized campaign," but perhaps your account gets locked if you're unlucky enough that two or three people file complaints within the same short time frame.

So I have no reason to doubt Mr. Trueman's claim that the PornHarms Facebook page never contained any content that violated Facebook's TOS. He says the page mostly contained links to academic research supposedly demonstrating the harmful effects of pornography, and that while the target audience was adult academics, there was nothing in the content that most parents would consider inappropriate for underage viewers. There was certainly no actual pornography on the page, not even in censored form with the fun parts blurred out (although I didn't check every single academic paper linked from the site to see if any of them might have used pixellated/censored porn for illustrative purposes). Trueman also says that they prevented third-party users from posting on the PornHarms page directly, and regularly monitored the page's content to remove any "inappropriate" comments that users had written in response to the officially authorized posts. (Of course, even if the page admins hadn't done this, inappropriate comments should be the basis for penalizing the user who posted them, not the Facebook page that they were posted on, but it was a moot point in this case.)

Because of the word "Pornography" in the title of the page, it's also of course possible that a human at Facebook actually did review the complaints, but thought the word "pornography" meant the page was a porn-trading hub, without looking to closely at it. (It's also possible that the word triggered an automated filter at Facebook. Obviously, there is no filter pre-emptively preventing pages with words like "pornography" in the title from being created, since otherwise the page never could have existed in the first place. But it's possible that an automated algorithm does something like the following: If a page receives X complains within time period Y, and the page contains certain keywords in the title or the content, then shut down the page automatically.)

Previously I'd suggested an algorithm that Facebook could use to stop users from coordinating phony complaints in order to shut a page down. The gist was: If a page receives a sufficient number of complaints, have the page reviewed by a random sample (chosen by Facebook) of Facebook users who had signed up to review abuse cases in situations such as these. If enough of those users vote that the page was violating the TOS, the page gets shut down, but if not, then it stays up. What makes this algorithm difficult to abuse, is that in order for a "coordinated mob" to swing the vote of the jury, they would have to comprise a majority (or a significant minority) of the entire set of users that the randomly-selected jury could have been chosen from -- a difficult task if thousands of people have signed up as content reviewers. I offered a $100 prize to be split between readers who submitted the best suggested improvements or criticisms of the idea; their ideas were summarized in a follow-up article. A couple of readers commented that there was no point in debating the idea since I don't work for Facebook and have no influence there; they have a point, but the idea has to start somewhere. If engineers at Facebook are looking for a way to fix the problem, one thing that can be said about this suggestion is that it was posted to a large audience of smart people, and several readers suggested very clever improvements, while nobody found any obviously fatal flaws in it.

It seems pretty likely that a process like that for reviewing abuse complaints, would have saved the Pornography Harms page from being yanked from Facebook. Anybody who seriously reviewed the page's contents for more than twenty seconds would have understood the page's real purpose and seen that it was not actually distributing pornography or otherwise violating the Facebook TOS. In my experiences posting surveys on sites like Mechanical Turk, where you can pay users a penny apiece for filling out surveys or performing other tasks, I've gotten the impression that people will take such tasks seriously, even for zero (or virtually zero) pay, if they find them interesting. In the case of the Facebook "jurors" who are voting on whether a page violated the TOS, you're talking about users who voluntarily signed up to be jurors, after all -- not underpaid workers grinding through as many tasks as they can squeeze into their working hours.

Finally, it would be easy to point out the irony of a pro-censorship group being censored (and some people did, on the mailing lists where I saw this news announced), but I don't think that's really fair to Morality in Media, since even MIM doesn't oppose people's right to express their opinions in favor of pornography. Likewise, MIM presumably supports the use of Internet blocking programs in schools, even though their Facebook page (as well as the companion website PornHarms.com) would probably be blocked by default by most Internet blockers because of the word "porn" in the URL -- but even that is not as richly ironic as it would seem. Neither Morality in Media, nor almost anyone else, is in favor of political sites about pornography being blocked because of the word "porn" in the address; presumably they'd just want the error corrected by the blocking company, and if a left-wing site on the opposite side of the debate happened to be blocked because of the word "porn" in the URL, I have no reason to think that Morality in Media would be opposed to correcting that error and unblocking that site as well. So this really isn't a case of them being given "a taste of their own medicine."

No, the real irony in this particular case -- at least, if I did have a role in getting their Facebook page restored -- is that not only would I support their right to express their view (duh), I would support students' right to bypass their school's Internet blocker to view the page from school if they had to, and I would even support the right of under-18-year-olds to view the page even if their parents were specifically trying to block them from it. I highly doubt that even anyone at Morality in Media would go that far.

Slashdot regular contributor Bennett Haselton writes: "An anti-porn organization's Facebook page is disabled by Facebook, and then resurrected. Was the page the victim of a 'complaint mob,' and could the previously-discussed 'voting algorithm' have saved the page from being shut down?"

Speaking of Facebook pages being unjustly shut down, on Monday the anti-porn Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/PornHarms/, run by the non-profit Morality in Media, was abruptly disabled by Facebook. The page had 35,000 "likes" at the time the plug was pulled. Morality in Media CEO Patrick Trueman, who also ran the Facebook page, says he never received any warning from Facebook before the page was removed.

Some time on Wednesday, the page was restored. I had emailed a contact at Facebook to ask why the page was shut down, and he replied later to say that it had been deleted in error and the page had been restored. (He didn't say whether the page was on track to being restored anyway, or whether it would have remained down indefinitely if I hadn't pinged him.)

Facebook did not respond to inquiries as to why the page was removed, but as Evgeny Morozov has pointed out regarding political pages (and as many other users have heard from people's anecdotal experiences having pages pulled without explanation), it's common for pages on Facebook and YouTube to get removed that were almost certainly not violating those sites' Terms of Service. If enough users decide to file "abuse complaints" simultaneously against a piece of content on Facebook or YouTube, this has a good chance of getting the content removed, whether the complaints were legitimate or were simply part of an organized campaign of filing false complaints.

Meanwhile, I correspond with dozens of people every week on Facebook (usually people who use my proxy sites to get on Facebook at school or work), and about once a week I get an automated message from Facebook that says, "You have been sending harassing messages to other users," and goes on to sternly list the types of messages that violate Facebook's TOS. (Only twice has this resulted in my account actually getting locked, and it was unlocked after I bugged my friend at Facebook about it.)

I figure that these are either the result of users clicking "Report this message" accidentally, or parents hacking into their kids' accounts, reading their messages, and then trying to get the account shut down of the person who was talking their kid about proxy sites. In either case, I assume it's not the result of an "organized campaign," but perhaps your account gets locked if you're unlucky enough that two or three people file complaints within the same short time frame.

So I have no reason to doubt Mr. Trueman's claim that the PornHarms Facebook page never contained any content that violated Facebook's TOS. He says the page mostly contained links to academic research supposedly demonstrating the harmful effects of pornography, and that while the target audience was adult academics, there was nothing in the content that most parents would consider inappropriate for underage viewers. There was certainly no actual pornography on the page, not even in censored form with the fun parts blurred out (although I didn't check every single academic paper linked from the site to see if any of them might have used pixellated/censored porn for illustrative purposes). Trueman also says that they prevented third-party users from posting on the PornHarms page directly, and regularly monitored the page's content to remove any "inappropriate" comments that users had written in response to the officially authorized posts. (Of course, even if the page admins hadn't done this, inappropriate comments should be the basis for penalizing the user who posted them, not the Facebook page that they were posted on, but it was a moot point in this case.)

Because of the word "Pornography" in the title of the page, it's also of course possible that a human at Facebook actually did review the complaints, but thought the word "pornography" meant the page was a porn-trading hub, without looking to closely at it. (It's also possible that the word triggered an automated filter at Facebook. Obviously, there is no filter pre-emptively preventing pages with words like "pornography" in the title from being created, since otherwise the page never could have existed in the first place. But it's possible that an automated algorithm does something like the following: If a page receives X complains within time period Y, and the page contains certain keywords in the title or the content, then shut down the page automatically.)

Previously I'd suggested an algorithm that Facebook could use to stop users from coordinating phony complaints in order to shut a page down. The gist was: If a page receives a sufficient number of complaints, have the page reviewed by a random sample (chosen by Facebook) of Facebook users who had signed up to review abuse cases in situations such as these. If enough of those users vote that the page was violating the TOS, the page gets shut down, but if not, then it stays up. What makes this algorithm difficult to abuse, is that in order for a "coordinated mob" to swing the vote of the jury, they would have to comprise a majority (or a significant minority) of the entire set of users that the randomly-selected jury could have been chosen from -- a difficult task if thousands of people have signed up as content reviewers. I offered a $100 prize to be split between readers who submitted the best suggested improvements or criticisms of the idea; their ideas were summarized in a follow-up article. A couple of readers commented that there was no point in debating the idea since I don't work for Facebook and have no influence there; they have a point, but the idea has to start somewhere. If engineers at Facebook are looking for a way to fix the problem, one thing that can be said about this suggestion is that it was posted to a large audience of smart people, and several readers suggested very clever improvements, while nobody found any obviously fatal flaws in it.

It seems pretty likely that a process like that for reviewing abuse complaints, would have saved the Pornography Harms page from being yanked from Facebook. Anybody who seriously reviewed the page's contents for more than twenty seconds would have understood the page's real purpose and seen that it was not actually distributing pornography or otherwise violating the Facebook TOS. In my experiences posting surveys on sites like Mechanical Turk, where you can pay users a penny apiece for filling out surveys or performing other tasks, I've gotten the impression that people will take such tasks seriously, even for zero (or virtually zero) pay, if they find them interesting. In the case of the Facebook "jurors" who are voting on whether a page violated the TOS, you're talking about users who voluntarily signed up to be jurors, after all -- not underpaid workers grinding through as many tasks as they can squeeze into their working hours.

Finally, it would be easy to point out the irony of a pro-censorship group being censored (and some people did, on the mailing lists where I saw this news announced), but I don't think that's really fair to Morality in Media, since even MIM doesn't oppose people's right to express their opinions in favor of pornography. Likewise, MIM presumably supports the use of Internet blocking programs in schools, even though their Facebook page (as well as the companion website PornHarms.com) would probably be blocked by default by most Internet blockers because of the word "porn" in the URL -- but even that is not as richly ironic as it would seem. Neither Morality in Media, nor almost anyone else, is in favor of political sites about pornography being blocked because of the word "porn" in the address; presumably they'd just want the error corrected by the blocking company, and if a left-wing site on the opposite side of the debate happened to be blocked because of the word "porn" in the URL, I have no reason to think that Morality in Media would be opposed to correcting that error and unblocking that site as well. So this really isn't a case of them being given "a taste of their own medicine."

No, the real irony in this particular case -- at least, if I did have a role in getting their Facebook page restored -- is that not only would I support their right to express their view (duh), I would support students' right to bypass their school's Internet blocker to view the page from school if they had to, and I would even support the right of under-18-year-olds to view the page even if their parents were specifically trying to block them from it. I highly doubt that even anyone at Morality in Media would go that far.

Slashdot regular contributor Bennett Haselton writes: "An anti-porn organization's Facebook page is disabled by Facebook, and then resurrected. Was the page the victim of a 'complaint mob,' and could the previously-discussed 'voting algorithm' have saved the page from being shut down?"

Speaking of Facebook pages being unjustly shut down, on Monday the anti-porn Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/PornHarms/, run by the non-profit Morality in Media, was abruptly disabled by Facebook. The page had 35,000 "likes" at the time the plug was pulled. Morality in Media CEO Patrick Trueman, who also ran the Facebook page, says he never received any warning from Facebook before the page was removed.

Some time on Wednesday, the page was restored. I had emailed a contact at Facebook to ask why the page was shut down, and he replied later to say that it had been deleted in error and the page had been restored. (He didn't say whether the page was on track to being restored anyway, or whether it would have remained down indefinitely if I hadn't pinged him.)

Facebook did not respond to inquiries as to why the page was removed, but as Evgeny Morozov has pointed out regarding political pages (and as many other users have heard from people's anecdotal experiences having pages pulled without explanation), it's common for pages on Facebook and YouTube to get removed that were almost certainly not violating those sites' Terms of Service. If enough users decide to file "abuse complaints" simultaneously against a piece of content on Facebook or YouTube, this has a good chance of getting the content removed, whether the complaints were legitimate or were simply part of an organized campaign of filing false complaints.

Meanwhile, I correspond with dozens of people every week on Facebook (usually people who use my proxy sites to get on Facebook at school or work), and about once a week I get an automated message from Facebook that says, "You have been sending harassing messages to other users," and goes on to sternly list the types of messages that violate Facebook's TOS. (Only twice has this resulted in my account actually getting locked, and it was unlocked after I bugged my friend at Facebook about it.)

I figure that these are either the result of users clicking "Report this message" accidentally, or parents hacking into their kids' accounts, reading their messages, and then trying to get the account shut down of the person who was talking their kid about proxy sites. In either case, I assume it's not the result of an "organized campaign," but perhaps your account gets locked if you're unlucky enough that two or three people file complaints within the same short time frame.

So I have no reason to doubt Mr. Trueman's claim that the PornHarms Facebook page never contained any content that violated Facebook's TOS. He says the page mostly contained links to academic research supposedly demonstrating the harmful effects of pornography, and that while the target audience was adult academics, there was nothing in the content that most parents would consider inappropriate for underage viewers. There was certainly no actual pornography on the page, not even in censored form with the fun parts blurred out (although I didn't check every single academic paper linked from the site to see if any of them might have used pixellated/censored porn for illustrative purposes). Trueman also says that they prevented third-party users from posting on the PornHarms page directly, and regularly monitored the page's content to remove any "inappropriate" comments that users had written in response to the officially authorized posts. (Of course, even if the page admins hadn't done this, inappropriate comments should be the basis for penalizing the user who posted them, not the Facebook page that they were posted on, but it was a moot point in this case.)

Because of the word "Pornography" in the title of the page, it's also of course possible that a human at Facebook actually did review the complaints, but thought the word "pornography" meant the page was a porn-trading hub, without looking to closely at it. (It's also possible that the word triggered an automated filter at Facebook. Obviously, there is no filter pre-emptively preventing pages with words like "pornography" in the title from being created, since otherwise the page never could have existed in the first place. But it's possible that an automated algorithm does something like the following: If a page receives X complains within time period Y, and the page contains certain keywords in the title or the content, then shut down the page automatically.)

Previously I'd suggested an algorithm that Facebook could use to stop users from coordinating phony complaints in order to shut a page down. The gist was: If a page receives a sufficient number of complaints, have the page reviewed by a random sample (chosen by Facebook) of Facebook users who had signed up to review abuse cases in situations such as these. If enough of those users vote that the page was violating the TOS, the page gets shut down, but if not, then it stays up. What makes this algorithm difficult to abuse, is that in order for a "coordinated mob" to swing the vote of the jury, they would have to comprise a majority (or a significant minority) of the entire set of users that the randomly-selected jury could have been chosen from -- a difficult task if thousands of people have signed up as content reviewers. I offered a $100 prize to be split between readers who submitted the best suggested improvements or criticisms of the idea; their ideas were summarized in a follow-up article. A couple of readers commented that there was no point in debating the idea since I don't work for Facebook and have no influence there; they have a point, but the idea has to start somewhere. If engineers at Facebook are looking for a way to fix the problem, one thing that can be said about this suggestion is that it was posted to a large audience of smart people, and several readers suggested very clever improvements, while nobody found any obviously fatal flaws in it.

It seems pretty likely that a process like that for reviewing abuse complaints, would have saved the Pornography Harms page from being yanked from Facebook. Anybody who seriously reviewed the page's contents for more than twenty seconds would have understood the page's real purpose and seen that it was not actually distributing pornography or otherwise violating the Facebook TOS. In my experiences posting surveys on sites like Mechanical Turk, where you can pay users a penny apiece for filling out surveys or performing other tasks, I've gotten the impression that people will take such tasks seriously, even for zero (or virtually zero) pay, if they find them interesting. In the case of the Facebook "jurors" who are voting on whether a page violated the TOS, you're talking about users who voluntarily signed up to be jurors, after all -- not underpaid workers grinding through as many tasks as they can squeeze into their working hours.

Finally, it would be easy to point out the irony of a pro-censorship group being censored (and some people did, on the mailing lists where I saw this news announced), but I don't think that's really fair to Morality in Media, since even MIM doesn't oppose people's right to express their opinions in favor of pornography. Likewise, MIM presumably supports the use of Internet blocking programs in schools, even though their Facebook page (as well as the companion website PornHarms.com) would probably be blocked by default by most Internet blockers because of the word "porn" in the URL -- but even that is not as richly ironic as it would seem. Neither Morality in Media, nor almost anyone else, is in favor of political sites about pornography being blocked because of the word "porn" in the address; presumably they'd just want the error corrected by the blocking company, and if a left-wing site on the opposite side of the debate happened to be blocked because of the word "porn" in the URL, I have no reason to think that Morality in Media would be opposed to correcting that error and unblocking that site as well. So this really isn't a case of them being given "a taste of their own medicine."

No, the real irony in this particular case -- at least, if I did have a role in getting their Facebook page restored -- is that not only would I support their right to express their view (duh), I would support students' right to bypass their school's Internet blocker to view the page from school if they had to, and I would even support the right of under-18-year-olds to view the page even if their parents were specifically trying to block them from it. I highly doubt that even anyone at Morality in Media would go that far.

Slashdot regular contributor Bennett Haselton writes: "An anti-porn organization's Facebook page is disabled by Facebook, and then resurrected. Was the page the victim of a 'complaint mob,' and could the previously-discussed 'voting algorithm' have saved the page from being shut down?"

Speaking of Facebook pages being unjustly shut down, on Monday the anti-porn Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/PornHarms/, run by the non-profit Morality in Media, was abruptly disabled by Facebook. The page had 35,000 "likes" at the time the plug was pulled. Morality in Media CEO Patrick Trueman, who also ran the Facebook page, says he never received any warning from Facebook before the page was removed.

Some time on Wednesday, the page was restored. I had emailed a contact at Facebook to ask why the page was shut down, and he replied later to say that it had been deleted in error and the page had been restored. (He didn't say whether the page was on track to being restored anyway, or whether it would have remained down indefinitely if I hadn't pinged him.)

Facebook did not respond to inquiries as to why the page was removed, but as Evgeny Morozov has pointed out regarding political pages (and as many other users have heard from people's anecdotal experiences having pages pulled without explanation), it's common for pages on Facebook and YouTube to get removed that were almost certainly not violating those sites' Terms of Service. If enough users decide to file "abuse complaints" simultaneously against a piece of content on Facebook or YouTube, this has a good chance of getting the content removed, whether the complaints were legitimate or were simply part of an organized campaign of filing false complaints.

Meanwhile, I correspond with dozens of people every week on Facebook (usually people who use my proxy sites to get on Facebook at school or work), and about once a week I get an automated message from Facebook that says, "You have been sending harassing messages to other users," and goes on to sternly list the types of messages that violate Facebook's TOS. (Only twice has this resulted in my account actually getting locked, and it was unlocked after I bugged my friend at Facebook about it.)

I figure that these are either the result of users clicking "Report this message" accidentally, or parents hacking into their kids' accounts, reading their messages, and then trying to get the account shut down of the person who was talking their kid about proxy sites. In either case, I assume it's not the result of an "organized campaign," but perhaps your account gets locked if you're unlucky enough that two or three people file complaints within the same short time frame.

So I have no reason to doubt Mr. Trueman's claim that the PornHarms Facebook page never contained any content that violated Facebook's TOS. He says the page mostly contained links to academic research supposedly demonstrating the harmful effects of pornography, and that while the target audience was adult academics, there was nothing in the content that most parents would consider inappropriate for underage viewers. There was certainly no actual pornography on the page, not even in censored form with the fun parts blurred out (although I didn't check every single academic paper linked from the site to see if any of them might have used pixellated/censored porn for illustrative purposes). Trueman also says that they prevented third-party users from posting on the PornHarms page directly, and regularly monitored the page's content to remove any "inappropriate" comments that users had written in response to the officially authorized posts. (Of course, even if the page admins hadn't done this, inappropriate comments should be the basis for penalizing the user who posted them, not the Facebook page that they were posted on, but it was a moot point in this case.)

Because of the word "Pornography" in the title of the page, it's also of course possible that a human at Facebook actually did review the complaints, but thought the word "pornography" meant the page was a porn-trading hub, without looking to closely at it. (It's also possible that the word triggered an automated filter at Facebook. Obviously, there is no filter pre-emptively preventing pages with words like "pornography" in the title from being created, since otherwise the page never could have existed in the first place. But it's possible that an automated algorithm does something like the following: If a page receives X complains within time period Y, and the page contains certain keywords in the title or the content, then shut down the page automatically.)

Previously I'd suggested an algorithm that Facebook could use to stop users from coordinating phony complaints in order to shut a page down. The gist was: If a page receives a sufficient number of complaints, have the page reviewed by a random sample (chosen by Facebook) of Facebook users who had signed up to review abuse cases in situations such as these. If enough of those users vote that the page was violating the TOS, the page gets shut down, but if not, then it stays up. What makes this algorithm difficult to abuse, is that in order for a "coordinated mob" to swing the vote of the jury, they would have to comprise a majority (or a significant minority) of the entire set of users that the randomly-selected jury could have been chosen from -- a difficult task if thousands of people have signed up as content reviewers. I offered a $100 prize to be split between readers who submitted the best suggested improvements or criticisms of the idea; their ideas were summarized in a follow-up article. A couple of readers commented that there was no point in debating the idea since I don't work for Facebook and have no influence there; they have a point, but the idea has to start somewhere. If engineers at Facebook are looking for a way to fix the problem, one thing that can be said about this suggestion is that it was posted to a large audience of smart people, and several readers suggested very clever improvements, while nobody found any obviously fatal flaws in it.

It seems pretty likely that a process like that for reviewing abuse complaints, would have saved the Pornography Harms page from being yanked from Facebook. Anybody who seriously reviewed the page's contents for more than twenty seconds would have understood the page's real purpose and seen that it was not actually distributing pornography or otherwise violating the Facebook TOS. In my experiences posting surveys on sites like Mechanical Turk, where you can pay users a penny apiece for filling out surveys or performing other tasks, I've gotten the impression that people will take such tasks seriously, even for zero (or virtually zero) pay, if they find them interesting. In the case of the Facebook "jurors" who are voting on whether a page violated the TOS, you're talking about users who voluntarily signed up to be jurors, after all -- not underpaid workers grinding through as many tasks as they can squeeze into their working hours.

Finally, it would be easy to point out the irony of a pro-censorship group being censored (and some people did, on the mailing lists where I saw this news announced), but I don't think that's really fair to Morality in Media, since even MIM doesn't oppose people's right to express their opinions in favor of pornography. Likewise, MIM presumably supports the use of Internet blocking programs in schools, even though their Facebook page (as well as the companion website PornHarms.com) would probably be blocked by default by most Internet blockers because of the word "porn" in the URL -- but even that is not as richly ironic as it would seem. Neither Morality in Media, nor almost anyone else, is in favor of political sites about pornography being blocked because of the word "porn" in the address; presumably they'd just want the error corrected by the blocking company, and if a left-wing site on the opposite side of the debate happened to be blocked because of the word "porn" in the URL, I have no reason to think that Morality in Media would be opposed to correcting that error and unblocking that site as well. So this really isn't a case of them being given "a taste of their own medicine."

No, the real irony in this particular case -- at least, if I did have a role in getting their Facebook page restored -- is that not only would I support their right to express their view (duh), I would support students' right to bypass their school's Internet blocker to view the page from school if they had to, and I would even support the right of under-18-year-olds to view the page even if their parents were specifically trying to block them from it. I highly doubt that even anyone at Morality in Media would go that far.

Slashdot regular contributor Bennett Haselton writes: "An anti-porn organization's Facebook page is disabled by Facebook, and then resurrected. Was the page the victim of a 'complaint mob,' and could the previously-discussed 'voting algorithm' have saved the page from being shut down?"

Speaking of Facebook pages being unjustly shut down, on Monday the anti-porn Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/PornHarms/, run by the non-profit Morality in Media, was abruptly disabled by Facebook. The page had 35,000 "likes" at the time the plug was pulled. Morality in Media CEO Patrick Trueman, who also ran the Facebook page, says he never received any warning from Facebook before the page was removed.

Some time on Wednesday, the page was restored. I had emailed a contact at Facebook to ask why the page was shut down, and he replied later to say that it had been deleted in error and the page had been restored. (He didn't say whether the page was on track to being restored anyway, or whether it would have remained down indefinitely if I hadn't pinged him.)

Facebook did not respond to inquiries as to why the page was removed, but as Evgeny Morozov has pointed out regarding political pages (and as many other users have heard from people's anecdotal experiences having pages pulled without explanation), it's common for pages on Facebook and YouTube to get removed that were almost certainly not violating those sites' Terms of Service. If enough users decide to file "abuse complaints" simultaneously against a piece of content on Facebook or YouTube, this has a good chance of getting the content removed, whether the complaints were legitimate or were simply part of an organized campaign of filing false complaints.

Meanwhile, I correspond with dozens of people every week on Facebook (usually people who use my proxy sites to get on Facebook at school or work), and about once a week I get an automated message from Facebook that says, "You have been sending harassing messages to other users," and goes on to sternly list the types of messages that violate Facebook's TOS. (Only twice has this resulted in my account actually getting locked, and it was unlocked after I bugged my friend at Facebook about it.)

I figure that these are either the result of users clicking "Report this message" accidentally, or parents hacking into their kids' accounts, reading their messages, and then trying to get the account shut down of the person who was talking their kid about proxy sites. In either case, I assume it's not the result of an "organized campaign," but perhaps your account gets locked if you're unlucky enough that two or three people file complaints within the same short time frame.

So I have no reason to doubt Mr. Trueman's claim that the PornHarms Facebook page never contained any content that violated Facebook's TOS. He says the page mostly contained links to academic research supposedly demonstrating the harmful effects of pornography, and that while the target audience was adult academics, there was nothing in the content that most parents would consider inappropriate for underage viewers. There was certainly no actual pornography on the page, not even in censored form with the fun parts blurred out (although I didn't check every single academic paper linked from the site to see if any of them might have used pixellated/censored porn for illustrative purposes). Trueman also says that they prevented third-party users from posting on the PornHarms page directly, and regularly monitored the page's content to remove any "inappropriate" comments that users had written in response to the officially authorized posts. (Of course, even if the page admins hadn't done this, inappropriate comments should be the basis for penalizing the user who posted them, not the Facebook page that they were posted on, but it was a moot point in this case.)

Because of the word "Pornography" in the title of the page, it's also of course possible that a human at Facebook actually did review the complaints, but thought the word "pornography" meant the page was a porn-trading hub, without looking to closely at it. (It's also possible that the word triggered an automated filter at Facebook. Obviously, there is no filter pre-emptively preventing pages with words like "pornography" in the title from being created, since otherwise the page never could have existed in the first place. But it's possible that an automated algorithm does something like the following: If a page receives X complains within time period Y, and the page contains certain keywords in the title or the content, then shut down the page automatically.)

Previously I'd suggested an algorithm that Facebook could use to stop users from coordinating phony complaints in order to shut a page down. The gist was: If a page receives a sufficient number of complaints, have the page reviewed by a random sample (chosen by Facebook) of Facebook users who had signed up to review abuse cases in situations such as these. If enough of those users vote that the page was violating the TOS, the page gets shut down, but if not, then it stays up. What makes this algorithm difficult to abuse, is that in order for a "coordinated mob" to swing the vote of the jury, they would have to comprise a majority (or a significant minority) of the entire set of users that the randomly-selected jury could have been chosen from -- a difficult task if thousands of people have signed up as content reviewers. I offered a $100 prize to be split between readers who submitted the best suggested improvements or criticisms of the idea; their ideas were summarized in a follow-up article. A couple of readers commented that there was no point in debating the idea since I don't work for Facebook and have no influence there; they have a point, but the idea has to start somewhere. If engineers at Facebook are looking for a way to fix the problem, one thing that can be said about this suggestion is that it was posted to a large audience of smart people, and several readers suggested very clever improvements, while nobody found any obviously fatal flaws in it.

It seems pretty likely that a process like that for reviewing abuse complaints, would have saved the Pornography Harms page from being yanked from Facebook. Anybody who seriously reviewed the page's contents for more than twenty seconds would have understood the page's real purpose and seen that it was not actually distributing pornography or otherwise violating the Facebook TOS. In my experiences posting surveys on sites like Mechanical Turk, where you can pay users a penny apiece for filling out surveys or performing other tasks, I've gotten the impression that people will take such tasks seriously, even for zero (or virtually zero) pay, if they find them interesting. In the case of the Facebook "jurors" who are voting on whether a page violated the TOS, you're talking about users who voluntarily signed up to be jurors, after all -- not underpaid workers grinding through as many tasks as they can squeeze into their working hours.

Finally, it would be easy to point out the irony of a pro-censorship group being censored (and some people did, on the mailing lists where I saw this news announced), but I don't think that's really fair to Morality in Media, since even MIM doesn't oppose people's right to express their opinions in favor of pornography. Likewise, MIM presumably supports the use of Internet blocking programs in schools, even though their Facebook page (as well as the companion website PornHarms.com) would probably be blocked by default by most Internet blockers because of the word "porn" in the URL -- but even that is not as richly ironic as it would seem. Neither Morality in Media, nor almost anyone else, is in favor of political sites about pornography being blocked because of the word "porn" in the address; presumably they'd just want the error corrected by the blocking company, and if a left-wing site on the opposite side of the debate happened to be blocked because of the word "porn" in the URL, I have no reason to think that Morality in Media would be opposed to correcting that error and unblocking that site as well. So this really isn't a case of them being given "a taste of their own medicine."

No, the real irony in this particular case -- at least, if I did have a role in getting their Facebook page restored -- is that not only would I support their right to express their view (duh), I would support students' right to bypass their school's Internet blocker to view the page from school if they had to, and I would even support the right of under-18-year-olds to view the page even if their parents were specifically trying to block them from it. I highly doubt that even anyone at Morality in Media would go that far.

CWmike writes "Amazon launched a Mac-specific application download store on Thursday that will compete with Apple's nearly five-month-old Mac App Store. The new subsection of Amazon's massive online store, dubbed 'Mac Software Downloads,' kicked off quietly Thursday. Amazon has long offered software downloads for both Windows and Mac customers, but this was the first time that the company called out its Mac-centric 'store.' The retailer, however, apparently did not want to goad Apple into another legal battle by mimicking its rival's 'App Store' moniker: The two companies are already in court over Amazon's 'Appstore for Android,' which Apple claims violates its trademark. Unlike the Mac App Store, which Apple opened in early January, Amazon's includes the popular Office for Mac line from Microsoft."

Bloomberg News reports that, as expected, today "[t]he US Senate approved a four-year extension of provisions in the USA Patriot Act allowing law enforcement to track suspected terrorists with roving wiretaps. ... The measure goes to the House for final passage before being sent to President Barack Obama for his signature. The surveillance powers would be extended until June 1, 2015." The story mentions that the Patriot Act powers this approval includes would extend "to so-called 'lone wolf' suspects who aren't affiliated with any terrorist group."

whoever57 writes "Ryan Gibbs, a UK footballer (soccer player) had obtained a 'superinjunction' that prevented him being named as the person involved in an affair with a minor celebrity. However, he was named by various users on Twitter. Now, in response to legal action initiated by Mr. Giggs in the UK courts against the users, Twitter has stated that it is prepared to identify the users who broke the injunction if it was 'legally required' to do so. Twitter will attempt to notify the users first in order to give them an opportunity to exercise their rights."

RickJWagner writes "I'm pretty certain this is the definitive guide to Apache Camel, destined to be referred to as 'The Camel Book' by Camel users for a long time. It covers Camel inside and out, upside and down, 550 pages worth of gritty detail that takes the reader from level zero to monitoring of your production applications. If you use Camel, or think you might want to, you need to pick up a copy of this book." Read below for the rest of Rick's review. Camel In Action author Claus Ibsen, Jonathan Anstey pages 552 publisher Manning Publications rating 9/10 reviewer RickJWagner ISBN 1935182366 summary A Camel tutorial full of small examples showing how to work with the integration patterns. If you haven't used Camel, it's known as an "Integration Framework", a phrase that I like to equate to "ESB Lite". By that I mean if you want to route messages or transform them, this is a tool you might consider. Still not quite sure what I'm describing? Here's a couple of examples. If you want to read messages from a JMS queue, use the contents to invoke a web service and put the results of the web service call in a database, Camel's a good tool. If you want to read in a flat file, split it into individual lines, take a part from each line to call a web service, Camel's a good tool. Camel does all this and more, acting as a sort of universal router and message transformer. Camel aims to implement the famed "Enterprise Integration Patterns", which are easily understandable descriptions of processing snippets that provide functionality in likely scenarios when you're using messaging. If you're brand new to this type of programming, I'd encourage you to use Google to check out "Enterprise Integration Patterns"-- you'll quickly get a feel for the workspace Camel lives in.

The book is exhaustive in it's coverage of Camel. It shows the reader how to configure Camel using both Java code and Spring configuration snippets. It's meant to be progressive in nature, showing the reader simple uses to start with, then progressing to more advanced scenarios as the book gets into the latter chapters. (More about this later, it involves my only complaint about the book.) Along the way, the authors address real-world topics like transactions, production monitoring, and deployment to different hosting containers. All told, the book reflects the concerns of someone who has actually used Camel for real-world work, and as such will prove to be an invaluable resource for anyone moving Camel to production.

The source code that goes with the book is clean, easy to read, and above all it works right out of the box. It's all Maven-centric, so if you're not a Maven user yet you will be at least partially practiced in it by the time you're done with this book. The examples are straight out of the chapters, so you can look to the book for a detailed explanation of what you're running. (You can also run what's being described, and monkey with it to learn new things. Very handy.) I offer no improvement for the sample code, it works as advertised.

I was especially impressed by the care the authors took to explain the really nitty-gritty stuff that a real-world user is going to need. Concurrency and transactions fall into this category. All the sample examples in the world won't help you if the book doesn't help you scale you app and make it safe for production use, considerations you sometimes don't find in tech books. They're here, though, and covered in sufficient detail to meet your go-to-production needs.

This is a big book, and the text it contains is as simple as it should be but no simpler. The illustrations are simple and relevant. If you're brand new to Camel and want to read it front to back, be prepared to allocate a good number of hours for this task. This is because there's just a lot of material covered here, none of it fluff. If you're already an established Camel user, this book will serve well as a desktop reference for when you want to venture off into more of Camel's abundant functionality.

So what's not to like? The only criticism I have for this book is that the ordering of the chapters is not quite to my liking. It starts out with the simple canned examples, and they get progressively harder, 'till the reader is finally given the knowledge to write their own applications way out in chapter 11. If you're like me, you like to see an example or two, then you like to start hacking out your own "Hello World" apps to get a feel for how to build the artifacts you need to get things running. I thought chapter 11 was too late in the game for that knowledge. In fairness, if you're a reader who doesn't mind skipping around as you read, then just skip to chapter 11 right away and you needn't worry about this tiny nit.

So who's this book good for? Camel users of all types, from beginners to those who already own running Camel apps will benefit from this book. You won't be sorry-- you'll never wish you'd held out for a better book, because there just flat isn't going to be one, at least not for a long, long time.

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

RickJWagner writes "I'm pretty certain this is the definitive guide to Apache Camel, destined to be referred to as 'The Camel Book' by Camel users for a long time. It covers Camel inside and out, upside and down, 550 pages worth of gritty detail that takes the reader from level zero to monitoring of your production applications. If you use Camel, or think you might want to, you need to pick up a copy of this book." Read below for the rest of Rick's review. Camel In Action author Claus Ibsen, Jonathan Anstey pages 552 publisher Manning Publications rating 9/10 reviewer RickJWagner ISBN 1935182366 summary A Camel tutorial full of small examples showing how to work with the integration patterns. If you haven't used Camel, it's known as an "Integration Framework", a phrase that I like to equate to "ESB Lite". By that I mean if you want to route messages or transform them, this is a tool you might consider. Still not quite sure what I'm describing? Here's a couple of examples. If you want to read messages from a JMS queue, use the contents to invoke a web service and put the results of the web service call in a database, Camel's a good tool. If you want to read in a flat file, split it into individual lines, take a part from each line to call a web service, Camel's a good tool. Camel does all this and more, acting as a sort of universal router and message transformer. Camel aims to implement the famed "Enterprise Integration Patterns", which are easily understandable descriptions of processing snippets that provide functionality in likely scenarios when you're using messaging. If you're brand new to this type of programming, I'd encourage you to use Google to check out "Enterprise Integration Patterns"-- you'll quickly get a feel for the workspace Camel lives in.

The book is exhaustive in it's coverage of Camel. It shows the reader how to configure Camel using both Java code and Spring configuration snippets. It's meant to be progressive in nature, showing the reader simple uses to start with, then progressing to more advanced scenarios as the book gets into the latter chapters. (More about this later, it involves my only complaint about the book.) Along the way, the authors address real-world topics like transactions, production monitoring, and deployment to different hosting containers. All told, the book reflects the concerns of someone who has actually used Camel for real-world work, and as such will prove to be an invaluable resource for anyone moving Camel to production.

The source code that goes with the book is clean, easy to read, and above all it works right out of the box. It's all Maven-centric, so if you're not a Maven user yet you will be at least partially practiced in it by the time you're done with this book. The examples are straight out of the chapters, so you can look to the book for a detailed explanation of what you're running. (You can also run what's being described, and monkey with it to learn new things. Very handy.) I offer no improvement for the sample code, it works as advertised.

I was especially impressed by the care the authors took to explain the really nitty-gritty stuff that a real-world user is going to need. Concurrency and transactions fall into this category. All the sample examples in the world won't help you if the book doesn't help you scale you app and make it safe for production use, considerations you sometimes don't find in tech books. They're here, though, and covered in sufficient detail to meet your go-to-production needs.

This is a big book, and the text it contains is as simple as it should be but no simpler. The illustrations are simple and relevant. If you're brand new to Camel and want to read it front to back, be prepared to allocate a good number of hours for this task. This is because there's just a lot of material covered here, none of it fluff. If you're already an established Camel user, this book will serve well as a desktop reference for when you want to venture off into more of Camel's abundant functionality.

So what's not to like? The only criticism I have for this book is that the ordering of the chapters is not quite to my liking. It starts out with the simple canned examples, and they get progressively harder, 'till the reader is finally given the knowledge to write their own applications way out in chapter 11. If you're like me, you like to see an example or two, then you like to start hacking out your own "Hello World" apps to get a feel for how to build the artifacts you need to get things running. I thought chapter 11 was too late in the game for that knowledge. In fairness, if you're a reader who doesn't mind skipping around as you read, then just skip to chapter 11 right away and you needn't worry about this tiny nit.

So who's this book good for? Camel users of all types, from beginners to those who already own running Camel apps will benefit from this book. You won't be sorry-- you'll never wish you'd held out for a better book, because there just flat isn't going to be one, at least not for a long, long time.

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

An anonymous reader writes with an editorial from ConceivableTech "Since Google's move to enable users to hide the URL bar, we have seen what could be the beginning of the end of one of the key features of the web browser. Mozilla has its own thoughts, but there is little doubt that Mozilla is reconsidering the purpose of the URL bar in future versions of its browsers. In a Mozilla Labs post today, David Regev suggests that the location bar should be replaced with a tool to support more than just one command."

dotancohen writes "Sharing users between Fedora and Debian-based distros just got a little easier. Beginning with Fedora 16, the Red-Hat based distro will number its human user UIDs starting from 1000, as opposed to the old 500. Though this change is intended to facilitate interoperability with other distros, it risks breaking backward compatibility with older Fedora releases including the newly released Fedora 15."

Orome1 writes "Spammers are establishing their own fake URL-shortening services to perform URL redirection, according to Symantec. This new spamming activity has contributed to this month's increase in spam by 2.9 percentage points, a rise that was also expected following the Rustock botnet takedown in March. Under this scheme, shortened links created on these fake URL-shortening sites are not included directly in spam messages. Instead, the spam emails contain shortened URLs created on legitimate URL-shortening sites. These shortened URLs lead to a shortened-URL on the spammer's fake URL-shortening Web site, which in turn redirects to the spammer's own Web site."

kkleiner writes "The University of Chicago's new $81 million Joe and Rika Mansueto Library is being referred to as the library of the future. You enter the library and find there are hardly any books, just a large reading room with computers. The library's 3.5 million books are stored inside 35,000 bins stacked within 50 foot tall racks in a massive 5-story chamber underneath the library. When you ask for a book an automated retrieval system involving huge, computer-activated robotic cranes finds the book you want, delivers it to the circulation desk, and eventually puts it back underground when you return it." The age of the personal-shopping library robot is getting closer and closer.

eldavojohn writes "Some soon-to-be-published research on gyrochronology has yielded a possible method for more accurately determining a star's age. While determining the age of stars in clusters has been done using the patterns of its color and brightness, singular stars are much more difficult. By comparing established age information from clusters and analyzing the spin of stars, the researchers have established a defined relationship between color (mass), spin and age giving them the beginning of a guide of 'stellar clocks.' This was accomplished after four painstaking years of collecting data from 71 single dwarf members of the open cluster NGC6811 and establishing a model using data from Kepler."

c0lo writes "The Canadian town of Mission, BC has a bylaw that allows the town's Public Safety Inspection Team to search people's homes for grow ops if they are using more than 93 kWh of electricity per day. There have allegedly been reports floating in IRC of two different cases of police showing up at a Bitcoin miner's residence with a search warrant. Ohio police and the DEA file at least 60 subpoenas each month for energy-use records of people suspected of running an indoor pot growing operation. DEA Agent Anthony Marotta said high electricity usage does not always mean the residence is an indoor pot farm and has surprised federal agents. 'We thought it was a major grow operation ... but this guy had some kind of business involving computers. I don't know how many computer servers we found in his home.'"

jrepin writes "The signatories of this statement are representatives of civil society from around the world working towards the promotion of Internet freedom, digital rights, and open communication. The French Presidency of the G8 is holding a G8 internet meeting -- the eG8 Forum -- immediately before the G8 Summit in Deauville, with a view to shaping the agenda of the G8 Summit regarding key global internet policy. This meeting is significant because this is the first year that the internet's role in society and the economy is explicitly on the G8 agenda. We believe that G8 Member States should use the e-G8 meeting as an opportunity to publicly commit to expanding internet access for all, combating digital censorship and surveillance, limiting online intermediary liability, and upholding principles of net neutrality."

From the article: SCADA systems -- computer systems that control industrial processes -- are one of the ways a computer hack can directly affect the real world. Here, the fears multiply. It's not bad guys deleting your files, or getting your personal information and taking out credit cards in your name; it's bad guys spewing chemicals into the atmosphere and dumping raw sewage into waterways. It's Stuxnet: centrifuges spinning out of control and destroying themselves. Never mind how realistic the threat is, it's scarier." What worries Bruce Schneier most is that industry leader Siemens is keeping its SCADA vulnerabilities secret, at least in part due to pressure from the Department of Homeland Security .

jfruhlinger writes "Google's refusal to not release Honeycomb source code is kosher because the code in question is released under the Apache license. But the kernel at the heart of Android is GPL'd, which means that code must be released. Google has actually been a good citizen in this regard — but many third-party Android vendors, not so much. While Asus has released their code, there are a host of companies that seem to have not done so, and Matthew Garrett is maintaining a list."

jrepin writes "In new free book the authors of twenty-five open source applications explain how their software is structured, and why. What are each program's major components? How do they interact? And what did their builders learn during their development? In answering these questions, the contributors to this book provide unique insights into how they think." Note: the whole text of the book, under a Creative Commons license, is available on the site.

A mere few days after the EFF called upon Apple to Indemnify developers against alleged infringement of Lodsys patents on in-app purchases, Apple has sent Lodsys a letter defending developers. Apple argues that it has a license to the Lodsys patents that extends to individual developers making the Lodsys claims invalid. Hopefully the baring of legal teeth will put this matter to rest.

Michael J. Ross writes "Years ago, technologists and consumers alike could only dream of surfing the Web using the (increasingly ubiquitous) mobile devices available, such as smartphones. But that is now commonplace, resulting from a convergence of several trends: the standardization of wireless access protocols, greater carrier coverage and bandwidth, the popularity of mobile apps, and more powerful mobile products — featuring embedded keyboards and pointing devices, greater memory, hardware miniaturization, and larger screens with better resolution. For the typical website nowadays, the primary impediment to the site working well on leading mobile devices is that the site was never intended for them in the first place. Web developers and other site builders using content management systems, can now learn how to build for mobile accessibility, with help from resources such as Professional Mobile Web Development with WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal — authored by James Pearce, who is quite active in the mobile development space." Read on for the rest of Michael's review. Professional Mobile Web Development With WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal author James Pearce pages 552 pages publisher Wrox rating 8/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-0470889510 summary A guide to building mobile-ready websites using the leading CMSs This book was published by Wrox, on 12 April 2011, under the ISBN 978-0470889510. It is a substantial volume, at 552 pages, which are organized into five parts. The bulk of the information is presented in the second and third parts. The former covers mobile development considerations independent of any particular content management system (CMS). It is in the third part that the author shows how to apply these techniques to websites and web apps created using the three leading CMSs — WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. Most of the example code shown in the book, from a dozen chapters, can be downloaded from the book's web page. Unfortunately, the Zip file contains even more Zip files, which is rather annoying. The book's web page offers the table of contents (both the high-level and detailed ones), a brief author bio, the book's index, and a sample chapter (the first one). The book's introduction states that the web page has a link to errata, but there does not appear to be any such link. (Even if there are no errata reported, the link should have still been added, or at least an explanation as to its absence.)

The first part of this book, "The World of the Mobile Web," begins with an introduction to the mobile Web (which originated just a couple years after the birth of the Web itself), and discusses at a high level the similarities and differences between website development for the desktop versus mobile devices. The author then provides an overview of mobile technologies and networks, their technical limitations, recent developments therein, online information resources, and mobile browsers. Chapter 5, "The Mobile Toolbox," will probably be of more interest to web developers than the earlier chapters, because it surveys the mobile development techniques, server-side technologies, and development tools that are most often used for creating mobile-ready websites. For nondevelopers, the section that describes the key components of a CMS, can be valuable as an introduction to CMSs.

In the second part, "General Mobile Techniques," the author briefly discusses some of the critical options which a web developer must decide upon to structure a website so that it will be suitable for mobile viewers. These include navigation menu depth, breadth, grouping, and placement; typography, pagination, multimedia, and forms; and CSS and JavaScript. He also addresses a decision that likely will have even greater consequences for the long term maintenance costs of a new website, namely, the entry point(s) and structure(s) of the mobile and desktop versions of the site relative to one another. Chapter 7, which explores browser detection and methods of allowing the user to switch between mobile and desktop versions of a website, marks a shift in the book, where the reader is first exposed to any significant amount of code. Most of it is straightforward, but would be better without the use of the clunky heredoc method for outputting HTML from within a PHP script. Earlier, the author makes clear that device detection techniques (specifically, for screen dimensions) are not foolproof. Thus it is perplexing why his CSS code specifies pixel-based widths for images with a class "full" — presumably to fill the entire width of the mobile device's screen — because any pixel-based fixed width could turn out to be improper for the device upon which it is rendered. Wouldn't something like "100%" be a much safer choice?

In Chapters 8 through 10, the author presents user interface patterns seen in the major content management systems — forms, content lists, image galleries, and comments — and discusses how they can be applied to websites intended to support mobile devices. The only information that seems to be missing is the reason, if any, the author recommends using divs for grouping input fields, and not (more semantically correct) fieldsets. He also discusses some key design considerations, as they relate to mobile websites (including CSS media queries), and some HTML/CSS templates and libraries that can be used as starting points (especially valuable if you want to roll your own solution, and not use any CMS plug-in).

The third part of the book, "Major CMS Platforms," demonstrates how to develop mobile websites using the three most commonly-used CMSs — WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla — and how to add more capabilities beyond what is provided by the chosen plug-ins. For WordPress, the solutions examined are dotMobi WordPress Mobile Pack (for which the author appears to be the lead developer), WPtouch, Mobile Edition, MobilePress, and Automattic WordPress. For Drupal, the main weakness in the material is that the author posits the Mobile Plugin module as a solution for Drupal 6 and 7 (even discussing Drupal 7 permissions), but there is no version of it for Drupal 7 — not even an alpha release, and there is no indication there ever will be one. Also, in Chapter 14, the API calls do not work for Drupal 7. Yet the coverage of the topics is generally clear and engaging.

In light of the growing popularity and capabilities of JavaScript frameworks, it is no surprise that in the fourth part of the book, "Enhancing and Launching Your Site," the author explores alternatives to the methods he presented in earlier chapters, by using two such frameworks for mobilizing websites: jQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch. The example code is based upon a WordPress website, and leverages a switcher plug-in and other code discussed earlier in the book. The penultimate chapter covers various techniques for testing and debugging mobile websites: browser plugins, mobile emulators, and online testing services. The last chapter discusses issues with (the network carriers') transcoders, traffic analysis, and mobile search and monetization. The fifth and final part of the book, "References," contains a handy glossary, as well as two appendices that provide recommendations for further reading and developer resources specific to the three CMSs utilized in the book, and various mobile Web organizations and industry players.

Overall, the writing quality is a bit better than average for computer books, with detailed and helpful explanations. However, in several cases, the author uses words he doesn't seem to understand: "RIM's legacy browser remains very populous" (page 68; should read "popular"); "inadmissible flaw" (page 185; one can only guess at the intended use of this judicial word); the delightfully redundant "pre-prepared" (page 208); and "rallied against" (page 209; should read "railed against"). There are numerous simpler errata: "as [a] whole" (page xxvi), "appraised" (page xxvii; should read "apprised"), "been build" (page 3), "switchboard[s]" (4), "connected [to] the Internet" (11), "marking" (11; should read "marketing"), "it's [a] phone" (14), "these are dealt with these" (19), "phone's" (40; should read "phones'"), "try and catch" (45; should read "try to catch"); ". at" (46), "is [a] good start" (75), "most CMS[s]" (116), "some CMS[s]" (125), "a[n] XML" (140), "an pertinent" (166), "you are introduced you" (182), "to [an] extreme" (185), "on [a] par" (187), "part [of] the" (188), "wheedle out" (199; should read "weed out"), "scaling is down" (200; should read "it"), "comprised of" (220), "there comments" (227), "go [to] the" (230), "allow you [to] tweak" (247), "Index.php" (262), "in [a] box" (269), "[non]greedy" (280), "http:// yoursite" (305), "suit[e]s" (340), and at this point I stopped recording errata.

There seems to be no consistency in the formatting of URLs: the inclusion or exclusion of "http://" and root directory slashes was seemingly decided upon randomly (e.g., page 53). One may find the occasional comma where a period was called for (same page, third paragraph). Also, there is an excessive use of exclamation marks, particularly in the earlier chapters. Lastly, the author has an odd habit of phrasing statements of what material will be covered next, in a commanding form, e.g., "you turn your attention to examining" (page 97) instead of, say, "we turn our attention to examining." It's not important, but it's unsettling, and in a couple cases, rather baffling, e.g., "You should briefly discuss how to access HTTP headers in your code" (page 133). With whom should the reader discuss it? Yet the book's style is, for the most part, conversational and easy to digest.

Readers will find plenty of illustrative figures. Although all of them are black and white only, they are without exception top quality and quite attractive, including the many screenshots and product images. The only place a figure is sorely needed, is on page 261, to clarify the discussion about em-based padding. The chapters end with brief summaries, which are of no value and simply make the book a bit longer than it needs to be. Also adding unnecessarily to its heft is the repeated reminder that the example code can be downloaded from the Wrox website.

Aside from the aforementioned blemishes, this book does a fine job of introducing the reader to all aspects of developing CMS-based websites suitable for mobile devices.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance website developer and writer.

You can purchase Professional Mobile Web Development With WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Michael J. Ross writes "Years ago, technologists and consumers alike could only dream of surfing the Web using the (increasingly ubiquitous) mobile devices available, such as smartphones. But that is now commonplace, resulting from a convergence of several trends: the standardization of wireless access protocols, greater carrier coverage and bandwidth, the popularity of mobile apps, and more powerful mobile products — featuring embedded keyboards and pointing devices, greater memory, hardware miniaturization, and larger screens with better resolution. For the typical website nowadays, the primary impediment to the site working well on leading mobile devices is that the site was never intended for them in the first place. Web developers and other site builders using content management systems, can now learn how to build for mobile accessibility, with help from resources such as Professional Mobile Web Development with WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal — authored by James Pearce, who is quite active in the mobile development space." Read on for the rest of Michael's review. Professional Mobile Web Development With WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal author James Pearce pages 552 pages publisher Wrox rating 8/10 reviewer Michael J. Ross ISBN 978-0470889510 summary A guide to building mobile-ready websites using the leading CMSs This book was published by Wrox, on 12 April 2011, under the ISBN 978-0470889510. It is a substantial volume, at 552 pages, which are organized into five parts. The bulk of the information is presented in the second and third parts. The former covers mobile development considerations independent of any particular content management system (CMS). It is in the third part that the author shows how to apply these techniques to websites and web apps created using the three leading CMSs — WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. Most of the example code shown in the book, from a dozen chapters, can be downloaded from the book's web page. Unfortunately, the Zip file contains even more Zip files, which is rather annoying. The book's web page offers the table of contents (both the high-level and detailed ones), a brief author bio, the book's index, and a sample chapter (the first one). The book's introduction states that the web page has a link to errata, but there does not appear to be any such link. (Even if there are no errata reported, the link should have still been added, or at least an explanation as to its absence.)

The first part of this book, "The World of the Mobile Web," begins with an introduction to the mobile Web (which originated just a couple years after the birth of the Web itself), and discusses at a high level the similarities and differences between website development for the desktop versus mobile devices. The author then provides an overview of mobile technologies and networks, their technical limitations, recent developments therein, online information resources, and mobile browsers. Chapter 5, "The Mobile Toolbox," will probably be of more interest to web developers than the earlier chapters, because it surveys the mobile development techniques, server-side technologies, and development tools that are most often used for creating mobile-ready websites. For nondevelopers, the section that describes the key components of a CMS, can be valuable as an introduction to CMSs.

In the second part, "General Mobile Techniques," the author briefly discusses some of the critical options which a web developer must decide upon to structure a website so that it will be suitable for mobile viewers. These include navigation menu depth, breadth, grouping, and placement; typography, pagination, multimedia, and forms; and CSS and JavaScript. He also addresses a decision that likely will have even greater consequences for the long term maintenance costs of a new website, namely, the entry point(s) and structure(s) of the mobile and desktop versions of the site relative to one another. Chapter 7, which explores browser detection and methods of allowing the user to switch between mobile and desktop versions of a website, marks a shift in the book, where the reader is first exposed to any significant amount of code. Most of it is straightforward, but would be better without the use of the clunky heredoc method for outputting HTML from within a PHP script. Earlier, the author makes clear that device detection techniques (specifically, for screen dimensions) are not foolproof. Thus it is perplexing why his CSS code specifies pixel-based widths for images with a class "full" — presumably to fill the entire width of the mobile device's screen — because any pixel-based fixed width could turn out to be improper for the device upon which it is rendered. Wouldn't something like "100%" be a much safer choice?

In Chapters 8 through 10, the author presents user interface patterns seen in the major content management systems — forms, content lists, image galleries, and comments — and discusses how they can be applied to websites intended to support mobile devices. The only information that seems to be missing is the reason, if any, the author recommends using divs for grouping input fields, and not (more semantically correct) fieldsets. He also discusses some key design considerations, as they relate to mobile websites (including CSS media queries), and some HTML/CSS templates and libraries that can be used as starting points (especially valuable if you want to roll your own solution, and not use any CMS plug-in).

The third part of the book, "Major CMS Platforms," demonstrates how to develop mobile websites using the three most commonly-used CMSs — WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla — and how to add more capabilities beyond what is provided by the chosen plug-ins. For WordPress, the solutions examined are dotMobi WordPress Mobile Pack (for which the author appears to be the lead developer), WPtouch, Mobile Edition, MobilePress, and Automattic WordPress. For Drupal, the main weakness in the material is that the author posits the Mobile Plugin module as a solution for Drupal 6 and 7 (even discussing Drupal 7 permissions), but there is no version of it for Drupal 7 — not even an alpha release, and there is no indication there ever will be one. Also, in Chapter 14, the API calls do not work for Drupal 7. Yet the coverage of the topics is generally clear and engaging.

In light of the growing popularity and capabilities of JavaScript frameworks, it is no surprise that in the fourth part of the book, "Enhancing and Launching Your Site," the author explores alternatives to the methods he presented in earlier chapters, by using two such frameworks for mobilizing websites: jQuery Mobile and Sencha Touch. The example code is based upon a WordPress website, and leverages a switcher plug-in and other code discussed earlier in the book. The penultimate chapter covers various techniques for testing and debugging mobile websites: browser plugins, mobile emulators, and online testing services. The last chapter discusses issues with (the network carriers') transcoders, traffic analysis, and mobile search and monetization. The fifth and final part of the book, "References," contains a handy glossary, as well as two appendices that provide recommendations for further reading and developer resources specific to the three CMSs utilized in the book, and various mobile Web organizations and industry players.

Overall, the writing quality is a bit better than average for computer books, with detailed and helpful explanations. However, in several cases, the author uses words he doesn't seem to understand: "RIM's legacy browser remains very populous" (page 68; should read "popular"); "inadmissible flaw" (page 185; one can only guess at the intended use of this judicial word); the delightfully redundant "pre-prepared" (page 208); and "rallied against" (page 209; should read "railed against"). There are numerous simpler errata: "as [a] whole" (page xxvi), "appraised" (page xxvii; should read "apprised"), "been build" (page 3), "switchboard[s]" (4), "connected [to] the Internet" (11), "marking" (11; should read "marketing"), "it's [a] phone" (14), "these are dealt with these" (19), "phone's" (40; should read "phones'"), "try and catch" (45; should read "try to catch"); ". at" (46), "is [a] good start" (75), "most CMS[s]" (116), "some CMS[s]" (125), "a[n] XML" (140), "an pertinent" (166), "you are introduced you" (182), "to [an] extreme" (185), "on [a] par" (187), "part [of] the" (188), "wheedle out" (199; should read "weed out"), "scaling is down" (200; should read "it"), "comprised of" (220), "there comments" (227), "go [to] the" (230), "allow you [to] tweak" (247), "Index.php" (262), "in [a] box" (269), "[non]greedy" (280), "http:// yoursite" (305), "suit[e]s" (340), and at this point I stopped recording errata.

There seems to be no consistency in the formatting of URLs: the inclusion or exclusion of "http://" and root directory slashes was seemingly decided upon randomly (e.g., page 53). One may find the occasional comma where a period was called for (same page, third paragraph). Also, there is an excessive use of exclamation marks, particularly in the earlier chapters. Lastly, the author has an odd habit of phrasing statements of what material will be covered next, in a commanding form, e.g., "you turn your attention to examining" (page 97) instead of, say, "we turn our attention to examining." It's not important, but it's unsettling, and in a couple cases, rather baffling, e.g., "You should briefly discuss how to access HTTP headers in your code" (page 133). With whom should the reader discuss it? Yet the book's style is, for the most part, conversational and easy to digest.

Readers will find plenty of illustrative figures. Although all of them are black and white only, they are without exception top quality and quite attractive, including the many screenshots and product images. The only place a figure is sorely needed, is on page 261, to clarify the discussion about em-based padding. The chapters end with brief summaries, which are of no value and simply make the book a bit longer than it needs to be. Also adding unnecessarily to its heft is the repeated reminder that the example code can be downloaded from the Wrox website.

Aside from the aforementioned blemishes, this book does a fine job of introducing the reader to all aspects of developing CMS-based websites suitable for mobile devices.

Michael J. Ross is a freelance website developer and writer.

You can purchase Professional Mobile Web Development With WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Even though he created the definitive guide to enjoying yourself outside, Jonathan Coulton is best known for the programmer anthem Code Monkey, his Thing a Week project, and writing the theme song to Portal. In 2005 Coulton left his programming job to pursue his music career, and has since become a successful one man music label. Jonathan has agreed to answer your questions about robots, life, and internet stardom. Normal Slashdot interview rules apply.

alphadogg writes "Sony expects the PlayStation Network hack will cost it $170 million this financial year, it said Monday. Unknown hackers hit the network gaming service for PlayStation 3 consoles in April, penetrating the system and stealing personal information from the roughly 77 million accounts on the PlayStation Network and sister Qriocity service. A second attack was directed at the Sony Online Entertainment network used for PC gaming. Sony responded to the attacks by taking the systems offline." Does the $170 million figure include compensation for PSN subscribers who suffered from the outage?

Here's frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton who writes "Facebook apparently hired a PR firm that tried to seduce some pundits into writing negative editorials about Google. The 'attack angle' would have been that Google was endangering users' privacy by scraping information about users from Facebook and making such information easier to find with a Google search." Hit the link below to read the rest of Bennett's story.

The reliably cynical Seth Finkelstein commented that the attempted editorial-planting was just "often implicit dealing made explicit", (i.e. that pundits are drafted as fronts for corporate publicity campaigns like this all the time, and that the PR firm in this case spoiled the game by rudely blurting out the terms of the deal, like a guy offering to buy a girl dinner if she'll sleep with him). Steven Levy of Wired opined that with regard to the privacy issues, Facebook was the real villain for exposing information in the first place that many users would rather keep private.

Some perspective here: In 2008, I was corresponding with a high school student (using one of the Circumventor sites to get around their local school Internet blocker, naturally) who mentioned that he was able to see all the personal information of other students in his Facebook high school network -- including email address, phone number, and home address, if the user had uploaded that information to Facebook -- even if those users had not confirmed him as a friend. (Facebook allows users to join one or more "networks" indicating their school affiliation, workplace, city of residence, etc. -- such networks are distinct from Facebook groups and fan pages.) Double-checking with a few more users in the same network and in other high school networks, we found that it really was possible for any member of a high school network to view the profiles of any other member of that high school network and see all of their personal information.

Unlike other types of "networks" on Facebook, it is not possible to join a high school network simply by specifying it in your preferences. However, all of the students that I corresponded with said that in order to join their high school networks, they simply had to request to join the network, and then get a friend request confirmed by an existing member of that high school network. Which means that conning your way into the network would be easy: either (1) create a profile with the name and photo of a real student at that school, and send out friend requests to that student's friends, hoping that one of them would confirm you (not remembering that they had already friended that person under their real account), or (2) create a profile with a hot girl's picture and send out random friend requests to a bunch of guys in the network. Once you got confirmed, you'd have access to all the personal information that any student in that high school had posted on their profile. (I hasten to add that we did not actually try either of these things, but it stands to reason that it would work, since it wasn't functionally any different from what all of those students actually had to do in order to join their networks in the first place!)

I sent a message to Facebook's security team about this, and got a non-form-letter response from a real person -- their reply, however, was that this behavior was by design:

We believe this allows for greater sharing and helps make the site more useful for people, though we also recognize the potential for misuse. That's why we've built a peer verification system around the joining of high school networks. We also use automated systems to detect and flag anomalous behavior, like lots of messages sent to non-friends or a high percentage of ignored friend requests.

Smart, but probably not secure enough. For one thing, if someone is creating disposable accounts to send out friend requests in hopes of getting into a high school network, it only has to work once, so even if most of their accounts get flagged for "anomalous behavior," they only need one that doesn't get flagged. And even if that account does get flagged and cancelled later, by that time it might be too late, if they've already grabbed enough users' information. In any case, some time between 2008 and 2011, Facebook did change the behavior of high school networks so that members can no longer see the personal information of other members without a confirmed friend request. But this loophole was not that difficult to find, and it's likely that at least a few other users had discovered the same issue.

Now, imagine what would have happened if Facebook had announced that, for a fee of a few hundred dollars, they were offering CDs for sale containing the names, addresses, mobile phone numbers, and instant messenger names of all the high school students on their site (along with, of course, all the photos those students had posted of themselves). It goes without saying that after the class action lawsuits had finished, there'd be nothing left of the company but a smoldering crater. Now, I'm not suggesting that Facebook's security policy for high school networks was anywhere near as bad as selling CDs with all the personal information of their high school users, but it's worth thinking about why it should not be considered as bad. In either case, anybody willing to spend a few hundred dollars (or, equivalently, a few hundred dollars' worth of effort -- the effort to discover the loophole, and then to crank out the friend requests) could obtain the personal information of as many high school students as they wanted. What's the difference?

Well, obviously, there's the message that it would send if a company like Facebook offered to sell CDs full of users' personal information. It would lower the bar for future behavior by similar companies, it would make users extremely cynical about trusting the motivations of social networking sites, and in the long run it might even cause courts to decide that users had no reasonable expectation of privacy when joining those sites, because it was "common knowledge" and "common practice" that those sites offered up people's personal information for sale! On the other hand, if Facebook makes that information available indirectly through "benign neglect" -- by, for example, forcing you to create a fake high school profile and send out a bunch of friend requests and create a new profile from scratch if your first one gets canned -- that's far less likely to cause the side effects I just listed. MySpace is not going to get the idea that it's OK to start selling CDs of users' personal information because, hey, Facebook let people pry out the same information if they jumped through enough hoops.

But what this means is that fairly mild privacy issues, if they arise as a result of deliberate choice by a company like Facebook, are likely to get more press attention than far more serious privacy issues that arise as a result of benign neglect. Because when Facebook makes a deliberate choice that affects user privacy (like sharing users' preferences with Pandora), the pundits and the public are reacting to the direct privacy implications of that action, plus all the auxiliary issues, like the "message" that it sends, and the precedent that it sets for future actions by that company and other companies. Whereas if an issue arises as a result of neglect (as in the case of PlayStation Networks users' credit cards being stolen), people are reacting only to the direct privacy implications of the incident, so the issue has to be much more serious to get the equivalent amount of press.

For example, the right reason to be concerned about Facebook sharing users' personal information with Pandora, was the principle that it violated -- if users say "no" to sharing their personal information, Facebook shouldn't be allowed to switch that choice unilaterally. But as for the practical implications -- come on. Facebook and Pandora are both big faceless corporate behemoths as far as we're concerned, so why would we trust one with our personal data but not the other? Besides, what if Facebook had simply bought out Pandora? Then they could share all of our personal information with all the employees of the newly merged Facepanbookdora, and the exact same people would have had access to the exact same data, but it wouldn't have violated the agreement against sharing information with "third parties," because they wouldn't be a third party any more.

When I first found that email addresses of Ameritrade customers had been obtained by a pump-and-dump stock spammer, I was sure (as were most readers, probably) that Ameritrade was not deliberately selling its customers' email addresses; I figured that they had simply left their database inadequately secured, and some third party had broken in and stolen it. On the other hand, because the incident happened as a result of benign neglect and not deliberate choice, I figured the incident would not garner much press as a result, and that seems to have been the case -- the wholesale thievery of Ameritrade customers' personal information by financial criminals received far less press attention than, say, Facebook's decision to change their privacy policy so they could share information with Pandora.

What this means is that if you're an ardent cyber-rights hippie like me, then yes, you should care about the privacy issues that set the blogosphere afire, even if they're fairly minor privacy issues that are magnified out of proportion because they speak to the deliberate intentions of the companies involved. It matters that Facebook decided one day to share our music preferences with Pandora, even if it doesn't hurt anyone.

On the other hand, if you simply care about threats to your personal privacy, then you should heavily discount the noise being made about deliberate choices taken by companies like Facebook, and pay far more attention to dangers of benign neglect by the company guarding your privacy, when that benign neglect is exploited by malicious outsiders. If you have a stalker and you're worried about them finding your Facebook profile, it makes no sense to be worried about Google scraping the information from the public version of your Facebook profile, if it's the same information that your stalker would be able to see anyway if they were logged in to Facebook themselves. It's far more likely that your stalker would try to exploit a weakness in Facebook's privacy settings -- for example, ingratiating themselves with one of your Facebook friends and getting them to accept a friend request, so that they can then see any information on your Facebook profile that is viewable to "friends of friends." Maybe you knew about that already, but if you didn't, you wouldn't know it from reading all the punditry about the Facebook-Google kerfuffle.

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* .

syngularyx writes "Mac sales in the enterprise during Apple's last fiscal quarter grew a whopping 66 percent, significantly outpacing the rest of the PC market, which grew just 4.5 percent in the enterprise. The data from Apple's previous fiscal quarter was highlighted on Friday by analyst Charlie Wolf with Needham & Company. He said though he originally viewed success in the enterprise as a "one-quarter blip," it now appears to be a "durable platform" for Apple." What makes this especially interesting is that Apple apparently isn't looking for corporate sales, and considers them "collateral success" rather than an indication that they should market specifically to corporate buyers.

Andy Smith writes "Slashdot has already covered the super-injunctions furore in the UK, with one famous footballer going after an anonymous Twitter user who broke a court order and revealed his extra-marital affair. Now another footballer has asked the attorney general to prosecute a well-known journalist and TV personality, who went against another super-injunction and wrote about this footballer, again on Twitter. Meanwhile, going back to the first footballer, it looks like he's got Twitter running scared, as the site is apparently blocking his name from appearing on the trend list, despite him being one of the most tweeted-about people."

jrepin writes with this excerpt from an announcement by KDE: "The Desktop Summit is a joint conference organized by the GNOME and KDE communities, the two dominant forces behind modern graphical software on free platforms. Over a thousand international participants are expected to attend. The main conference takes place from 6-8 August. The annual membership meetings of GNOME and KDE are scheduled for 9 August, followed by workshops and coding sessions on 10-12 August."

Earlier this week, we discussed reports that Mac malware was finally becoming a significant problem. Now, reader wiredmikey points out an editorial arguing that everyone should slow down and analyze the situation more calmly so the threat can be accurately assessed. Quoting: "According to Apple, the Mac installed base is approximately 50 million users. But according to Gartner, the number of Android handsets sold in 2010 alone exceeded 67 million units, giving it an installed base that is larger, and growing much faster, than the Mac base. If a large numbers of eyeballs is indeed the lure that causes criminals to write malware for a given operating system, surely Android is a more tempting target than Mac OS. ... I predict that the increase in perceived risks to Mac customers will give Apple the excuse it needs to increase its control over the Mac software ecosystem, by moving ISVs to the Mac App Store. It is no accident that the theme of the upcoming Lion desktop operating system is 'Back to the Mac': taking concepts that Apple employed successfully with the mobile version of OS X (iOS) and back-porting them to the desktop OS. One of those features is the introduction of the Mac App Store, an Apple-controlled storefront for selling and distributing applications. ... This provides buyers some assurance that their apps are from known points of origin and that they don’t contain malware, such as the Mac Defender Trojan horse.

Julie188 writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation is calling on Apple to indemnify its developers from Lodsys — a patent troll that's alleging patent infringement on the in-app purchasing used by iOS apps. (That's the technology developed by Apple and forced on many of its developers.) The letters Lodsys has been sending out came to light on May 13th, and apparently developers have been asking Apple for help to no avail."

recoiledsnake writes "What would be your first guess about what an app store sells? Don't be fooled, Apple warns, the phrase 'app store' is not generic and can only be used to describe Cupertino's... um, app store? 'Apple denies that, based on their common meaning, the words "app store" together denote a store for apps,' Apple said in a Thursday filing with a California district court. All this notwithstanding that Jobs himself used the phrase generically while referring to Android app stores. We've previously discussed this ongoing legal battle."