Slashdot Mirror

Several readers have sent in follow-up articles to Wednesday's news that iPhone location data was being tracked and stored. First, it seems Android shares a similar problem, though the file containing the location data is "only accessible on devices that have been rooted and opened up to installation of unsigned apps." Developer Magnus Eriksson has created an app to flush this data. Next: the iPhone tracking file is not new, just in a different place than it used to be. Reader overThruster then points out a CNet story indicating that law enforcement has been aware of this file for some time, and has used it in a forensics context. This story is a growing concern for Apple, particularly now that Senator Al Franken (PDF) and Rep. Ed Markey (PDF) have both written letters to Steve Jobs demanding details about the location tracking. Finally, PCMag explains how to view the location data present on your iPhone, should you so desire.

An anonymous reader writes "Agile Development & Business Goals: The Six Week Solution has scrum-like elements, fairly rapid iterations, automated testing, and some other things that you have come to rely on to make your Agile methodology work. But the Six Week Solution agile process has some other things, too, that make it a very interesting take on the classic Agile approach." Read below for the rest of the AC's review. Agile Development & Business Goals: The Six Week Solution author Bill Holtsnider, Tom Wheeler, George Stragand, Joseph Gee pages 256 publisher Morgan Kaufmann rating 8/10 reviewer anonymous ISBN 978-0-12-381520-0 summary This book serves as a distilled learning guide for managing technical resources in a manner that directly boosts your bottom line. For a company considering going Agile, this book might be a good place to start.The book talks in detail about topics such as Test Driven Development, build server software and SAAS. It also discusses specific release schedule planning to meet sales goals, revenue formulas and cost of change graphs. In other words, both technical topics are covered in depth and detailed business topics are covered in depth. The two worlds are integrated throughout the book (and the process).The basic premise is that software should be "released" on a targeted six-week schedule. There are eight six-week cycles in a calendar year, and releasing your software three times a quarter allows the Business to plan their own cycles accordingly. And the Business does not get software with random features someone thought should be added; they get targeted software built to their specifications.

Of the many features discussed in the book, two set this process apart: You should directly align your software development with the needs of the Business. You should compensate your development team based on delivering on their commitments. (If they deliver, they get rewarded; if they don't deliver, there are consequences.) Combined with the rigors of an automated testing program the authors demand and you have a distinct approach to an old problem: "How can I build the exact software I need as quickly and efficiently as possible?"

Among other audiences, this book is perfect for management types who might not be able to spell "Agile". They don't want the details, they want their software development teams to be held accountable and produce useful results. In the intro the authors ask 10 questions: Does your software development process:

1. Align software development with business needs?
2. Compensate your development team based on delivering on their commitments?
3. Lend itself to a description so simple that everyone in the company can understand it?
4. Have both core Business and core Technical components?
5. Produce revenue-generating results that address real-world needs?
6. Tie your investment in your software development to the delivery of the software you need?
7. Account directly for Quality?
8. Hit your short term goals while -
9. Addressing your long-term goals at the same time?
10. Reward success and make tangible the effects of failure?

Some of the points are standard Agile fare with small or insignificant twists. (How many times have you read: "A successful software project needs to build the right software, build the software right."?) And there are other places where the "Please Rename My Old Waterfall SDLC to Agile" button has been pressed.

But then there are the variances. The authors are pretty consistent throughout the book of detailing the similarities and differences between their approach and other Agile approaches. In a summary paragraph (again in the intro), they write: Compensation Piece: Performance is rewarded and, on the flip side, failure is penalized. Bonuses are paid (or not) every six weeks, not in some vague future annual date. No Reward for Success: Other processes do not reward success. Given that, what is the difference in classic development for the next sprint if everything was or was not delivered? No Risk in Failure: Other processes do not have to share the business' cost with the team when it fails; they just do another sprint and hope for the best again. If Cycle Fails Developers, Lose Money: Developers have a vested interest in delivering, not some vague promise of some future payoff. Other Agile Processes Iterate a Lot but Let the Boxes Fall Where They May: If a sprint fails to meet the objective, what happens? A boss stomps and shouts, everybody feels bad, and then they do the same thing all again. Other Agile Processes Do Not Align with Business: Sure there may be an on-site customer, but there is nothing to enforce exposure of what is being developed outside of the development group. With the Six Week Solution, the work done is what you really need done.

Some form of Agile software development may become (if it has not already) the standard method of software development in the future. But there is little question that the aggressive merging of the goals of the company and goals of the software teams has to happen. Too often software divisions do their own thing, pursuing targets that meet their requirements but are not aligned with those of the company as a whole.

This book details one method of bringing the aims of the Business and software development together. It is a different approach to Agile: disciplined release schedules, fully integrated automatic testing processes, specific monetary incentives, particular physical layouts. Many of these ideas are interesting to read about. And the authors have clearly lived these ideas.

This book is not for everyone – Agile purists will hate it, IMHO – but the audience for this book is people (tech and non-tech) who think about and explore the various ways to get software written. Thirty-five years after Brooks, we still don't have the answer. This book is a different take on the problem. But the rigor, unique approaches, detailed implementation techniques, practical (not theoretical) suggestions, real-world stories from the front lines of software development and internal cohesiveness – all of these suggest that the Six Week Solution book deserves a look for any organization considering implementing agile practices.

You can purchase Agile Development & Business Goals: The Six Week Solution 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 "Agile Development & Business Goals: The Six Week Solution has scrum-like elements, fairly rapid iterations, automated testing, and some other things that you have come to rely on to make your Agile methodology work. But the Six Week Solution agile process has some other things, too, that make it a very interesting take on the classic Agile approach." Read below for the rest of the AC's review. Agile Development & Business Goals: The Six Week Solution author Bill Holtsnider, Tom Wheeler, George Stragand, Joseph Gee pages 256 publisher Morgan Kaufmann rating 8/10 reviewer anonymous ISBN 978-0-12-381520-0 summary This book serves as a distilled learning guide for managing technical resources in a manner that directly boosts your bottom line. For a company considering going Agile, this book might be a good place to start.The book talks in detail about topics such as Test Driven Development, build server software and SAAS. It also discusses specific release schedule planning to meet sales goals, revenue formulas and cost of change graphs. In other words, both technical topics are covered in depth and detailed business topics are covered in depth. The two worlds are integrated throughout the book (and the process).The basic premise is that software should be "released" on a targeted six-week schedule. There are eight six-week cycles in a calendar year, and releasing your software three times a quarter allows the Business to plan their own cycles accordingly. And the Business does not get software with random features someone thought should be added; they get targeted software built to their specifications.

Of the many features discussed in the book, two set this process apart: You should directly align your software development with the needs of the Business. You should compensate your development team based on delivering on their commitments. (If they deliver, they get rewarded; if they don't deliver, there are consequences.) Combined with the rigors of an automated testing program the authors demand and you have a distinct approach to an old problem: "How can I build the exact software I need as quickly and efficiently as possible?"

Among other audiences, this book is perfect for management types who might not be able to spell "Agile". They don't want the details, they want their software development teams to be held accountable and produce useful results. In the intro the authors ask 10 questions: Does your software development process:

1. Align software development with business needs?
2. Compensate your development team based on delivering on their commitments?
3. Lend itself to a description so simple that everyone in the company can understand it?
4. Have both core Business and core Technical components?
5. Produce revenue-generating results that address real-world needs?
6. Tie your investment in your software development to the delivery of the software you need?
7. Account directly for Quality?
8. Hit your short term goals while -
9. Addressing your long-term goals at the same time?
10. Reward success and make tangible the effects of failure?

Some of the points are standard Agile fare with small or insignificant twists. (How many times have you read: "A successful software project needs to build the right software, build the software right."?) And there are other places where the "Please Rename My Old Waterfall SDLC to Agile" button has been pressed.

But then there are the variances. The authors are pretty consistent throughout the book of detailing the similarities and differences between their approach and other Agile approaches. In a summary paragraph (again in the intro), they write: Compensation Piece: Performance is rewarded and, on the flip side, failure is penalized. Bonuses are paid (or not) every six weeks, not in some vague future annual date. No Reward for Success: Other processes do not reward success. Given that, what is the difference in classic development for the next sprint if everything was or was not delivered? No Risk in Failure: Other processes do not have to share the business' cost with the team when it fails; they just do another sprint and hope for the best again. If Cycle Fails Developers, Lose Money: Developers have a vested interest in delivering, not some vague promise of some future payoff. Other Agile Processes Iterate a Lot but Let the Boxes Fall Where They May: If a sprint fails to meet the objective, what happens? A boss stomps and shouts, everybody feels bad, and then they do the same thing all again. Other Agile Processes Do Not Align with Business: Sure there may be an on-site customer, but there is nothing to enforce exposure of what is being developed outside of the development group. With the Six Week Solution, the work done is what you really need done.

Some form of Agile software development may become (if it has not already) the standard method of software development in the future. But there is little question that the aggressive merging of the goals of the company and goals of the software teams has to happen. Too often software divisions do their own thing, pursuing targets that meet their requirements but are not aligned with those of the company as a whole.

This book details one method of bringing the aims of the Business and software development together. It is a different approach to Agile: disciplined release schedules, fully integrated automatic testing processes, specific monetary incentives, particular physical layouts. Many of these ideas are interesting to read about. And the authors have clearly lived these ideas.

This book is not for everyone – Agile purists will hate it, IMHO – but the audience for this book is people (tech and non-tech) who think about and explore the various ways to get software written. Thirty-five years after Brooks, we still don't have the answer. This book is a different take on the problem. But the rigor, unique approaches, detailed implementation techniques, practical (not theoretical) suggestions, real-world stories from the front lines of software development and internal cohesiveness – all of these suggest that the Six Week Solution book deserves a look for any organization considering implementing agile practices.

You can purchase Agile Development & Business Goals: The Six Week Solution 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 "Since last night, the Large Hadron Collider is officially the most powerful accelerator in the world. While a record energy level had been reached last year, the new luminosity level, surpassing Fermilab's capabilities, is a new achievement. 'Higher intensity means more data, and more data means greater discovery potential,' as CERN Director General Rolf Heuer says."

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft and Nokia yesterday announced the signing of a definitive agreement regarding their global mobile ecosystem partnership. We already know that Microsoft and Nokia will work together to reach out to developers, but the two have agreed to make Windows Phone developer registration free for all Nokia developers. There are also plans to open a new Nokia-branded global application store that leverages the Windows Phone Marketplace infrastructure so that developers can publish and distribute applications through a single developer portal to consumers that use Windows Phone, Symbian, and Series 40 devices. Lastly, Nokia will contribute its expertise in operator billing to ensure participants in the Windows Phone ecosystem can take advantage of Nokia's billing agreements with 112 operators in 36 markets."

An anonymous reader writes "Despite Slashdot (and much of the internet) ridiculing the New York Time for its archaic and overpriced paywall, the newspaper has reported an excess of one hundred thousand subscribers so far. Even as loopholes are offered, the New York Times has some support which they will need as print revenues dwindle (falling a staggering 57.6 percent during the year's first quarter)." Whether 100 thousand is a high number or a low one I guess depends on the NYT's business plan. Have they lost advertising revenue, and if so, how much? Have they turned many readers to alternative news sources?

An anonymous reader writes "Despite Slashdot (and much of the internet) ridiculing the New York Time for its archaic and overpriced paywall, the newspaper has reported an excess of one hundred thousand subscribers so far. Even as loopholes are offered, the New York Times has some support which they will need as print revenues dwindle (falling a staggering 57.6 percent during the year's first quarter)." Whether 100 thousand is a high number or a low one I guess depends on the NYT's business plan. Have they lost advertising revenue, and if so, how much? Have they turned many readers to alternative news sources?

Last month we reported that Amazon was confronting lenders of Kindle e-books. Today, thebian writes "Amazon announced yesterday that it would allow 11,000 libraries in the US to lend ebooks. The press release doesn't say exactly when this will start. Amazon is trying to speed the adoption of the Kindles. If people are slow to flock to the device the reason is the high prices the publishers cling to. Amazon itself sometimes undercuts Kindle prices, and almost always some booksellers on the Amazon Marketplace undercut the Kindle. There's no indication about what books might be offered through this program."

An anonymous reader writes "It took almost two years, but the US Postal Regulatory Commission just ruled (PDF) that the US Postal Service '...had unduly discriminated against GameFly.' GameFly recently complained that the additional postage was costing them $730,000 per month."

jm2dev writes "The title is self descriptive, you will learn what a REST architecture is, the concepts behind it, advantages and constraints, and how to implement web services in a RESTful way serving and consuming content using the Java programming language, as command line applications, desktop graphical client, run by an application server or even as standalone applications. Almost everything you need to know to start working with web services in Java the REST way is covered by this book." Read on for the rest of Jose's review. RESTful Java Web Services author Jose Sandoval pages 258 publisher Packt Publishing rating 9/10 reviewer Jose Miguel Martinez Carrasco ISBN 978-1-847196-46-0 summary Learn the concepts and ideas behind REST web services and implement working solutions using different popular frameworks. No previous knowledge about REST is required, as the author presents a good introduction to Representational State Transfer; although the reader is supposed to understand the Java language syntax as you can expect because of the title. Any further familiarities are not needed, because to use the code samples only the Java Development Kit is required, so you can try it and play with it on any computer with a java SDK, like OpenJDK 6, installed and configured, with your favorite plain text editor or with a fully featured modern IDE. .

The book starts with an introduction to the REST software architectural style. The concepts behind REST, their main components, constraints and ideas that made a software system RESTful. The details of the HTTP requests and responses interchanged by clients and servers are explained. And the role that REST services play in Service Oriented Architectures is discussed.

Next, several clients to consume web services using the Twitter messaging API are explained and the simplicity to consume REST web services will encourage readers to experiment with other REST web services available in Internet.

The ability to retrieve information from more than one web service is a nice feature practically implemented as a simple mashup in the third chapter. A web page displays the results obtained by requests to Google, Yahoo, Twitter and TextWise's SemanticHacker REST web services.

Now that the way to consume information provided by REST web services has been explained, it's time to start thinking about the other part of the equation: considerations to design a REST web service are introduced, discussed, and a simple microblogging solution is developed and used during the next chapters. From my point of view this part is very useful, as the author has done a good job providing a reusable solution, and remarking how important is in modern software development to provide a smart design that can fit different scenarios with minimum modifications.

Readers will be able to implement a single desktop client, to perform those actions, and although this approach looks like has lost popularity among developers, this section will be useful for those developers that are in the need to create a desktop client instead of a web based one.

Clients need servers to consume information from, and the next chapters describe popular frameworks like Restlet (both versions 1.1 and 2.0), Sun's Jersey (now Oracle's) and JBoss' Resteasy, with a clear emphasis on their usage of JAX-RS implementation, and finally Struts 2 with the REST plugin. How the same REST web service can be implemented using any of them is a worthy reminder of the fact that properly modularized software provides a valuable way to reuse existing code. The author tries to be neutral but he highlighted important aspects to consider before choosing any of them like, as the features they provide can fit better different scenarios.

Although a client consuming web services have been implementing as a desktop client and as a web based client using servlets and JSP pages, the introduced frameworks provide a simpler way to implement clients, which is very handful because they are needed to test our web services work as we expect. Regarding this aspect, developed in chapter nine, I miss a chapter talking about REST web services testing that can be used in continuous integration environment to automate our tests.

Finally, additional topics are treated like authentication and security, which aren't essential to get the basic functionality, but are needed frequently in real world applications and here you will find a nice introduction to those topics.

I found this book very well structured, starting with an introduction to REST concepts and architecture, its advantages and constraints, and a comparison against other alternatives. Complexity is managed terrifically, as readers see their questions answered with working solutions, that can be easily tested in a computer with a working java development environment. Starting with how to query popular web services with a browser, and later on implementing our first and simple clients and servers with widely used open source frameworks.

From my point of view, Java developers with no experience in REST architectures will find this book specially useful, despite your experience the book provides a good explanation of well designed architectures and how important they are to achieve a working, elegant and easy to maintain solution, and this aspect is exposed with working and useful implementations.

Packt Publishing books are characterized by a well formatted text with easy to understand language and at the same time being precise. It is these facts that make even this technical book a pleasurable reading experience.

The code provided through out all the book are easy to understand and implement. Here the author made a good work explaining the key concepts and how they are translated into code. Furthermore, in order to be practical, the needed Java libraries are provided, almost eliminating the chance to incur in compilation errors. Of course, a working implementation can be downloaded for those of the reader who prefer not to type more than the essential.

Jose Miguel is a java software developer and open source enthusiast based in London. @jm2dev

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

jm2dev writes "The title is self descriptive, you will learn what a REST architecture is, the concepts behind it, advantages and constraints, and how to implement web services in a RESTful way serving and consuming content using the Java programming language, as command line applications, desktop graphical client, run by an application server or even as standalone applications. Almost everything you need to know to start working with web services in Java the REST way is covered by this book." Read on for the rest of Jose's review. RESTful Java Web Services author Jose Sandoval pages 258 publisher Packt Publishing rating 9/10 reviewer Jose Miguel Martinez Carrasco ISBN 978-1-847196-46-0 summary Learn the concepts and ideas behind REST web services and implement working solutions using different popular frameworks. No previous knowledge about REST is required, as the author presents a good introduction to Representational State Transfer; although the reader is supposed to understand the Java language syntax as you can expect because of the title. Any further familiarities are not needed, because to use the code samples only the Java Development Kit is required, so you can try it and play with it on any computer with a java SDK, like OpenJDK 6, installed and configured, with your favorite plain text editor or with a fully featured modern IDE. .

The book starts with an introduction to the REST software architectural style. The concepts behind REST, their main components, constraints and ideas that made a software system RESTful. The details of the HTTP requests and responses interchanged by clients and servers are explained. And the role that REST services play in Service Oriented Architectures is discussed.

Next, several clients to consume web services using the Twitter messaging API are explained and the simplicity to consume REST web services will encourage readers to experiment with other REST web services available in Internet.

The ability to retrieve information from more than one web service is a nice feature practically implemented as a simple mashup in the third chapter. A web page displays the results obtained by requests to Google, Yahoo, Twitter and TextWise's SemanticHacker REST web services.

Now that the way to consume information provided by REST web services has been explained, it's time to start thinking about the other part of the equation: considerations to design a REST web service are introduced, discussed, and a simple microblogging solution is developed and used during the next chapters. From my point of view this part is very useful, as the author has done a good job providing a reusable solution, and remarking how important is in modern software development to provide a smart design that can fit different scenarios with minimum modifications.

Readers will be able to implement a single desktop client, to perform those actions, and although this approach looks like has lost popularity among developers, this section will be useful for those developers that are in the need to create a desktop client instead of a web based one.

Clients need servers to consume information from, and the next chapters describe popular frameworks like Restlet (both versions 1.1 and 2.0), Sun's Jersey (now Oracle's) and JBoss' Resteasy, with a clear emphasis on their usage of JAX-RS implementation, and finally Struts 2 with the REST plugin. How the same REST web service can be implemented using any of them is a worthy reminder of the fact that properly modularized software provides a valuable way to reuse existing code. The author tries to be neutral but he highlighted important aspects to consider before choosing any of them like, as the features they provide can fit better different scenarios.

Although a client consuming web services have been implementing as a desktop client and as a web based client using servlets and JSP pages, the introduced frameworks provide a simpler way to implement clients, which is very handful because they are needed to test our web services work as we expect. Regarding this aspect, developed in chapter nine, I miss a chapter talking about REST web services testing that can be used in continuous integration environment to automate our tests.

Finally, additional topics are treated like authentication and security, which aren't essential to get the basic functionality, but are needed frequently in real world applications and here you will find a nice introduction to those topics.

I found this book very well structured, starting with an introduction to REST concepts and architecture, its advantages and constraints, and a comparison against other alternatives. Complexity is managed terrifically, as readers see their questions answered with working solutions, that can be easily tested in a computer with a working java development environment. Starting with how to query popular web services with a browser, and later on implementing our first and simple clients and servers with widely used open source frameworks.

From my point of view, Java developers with no experience in REST architectures will find this book specially useful, despite your experience the book provides a good explanation of well designed architectures and how important they are to achieve a working, elegant and easy to maintain solution, and this aspect is exposed with working and useful implementations.

Packt Publishing books are characterized by a well formatted text with easy to understand language and at the same time being precise. It is these facts that make even this technical book a pleasurable reading experience.

The code provided through out all the book are easy to understand and implement. Here the author made a good work explaining the key concepts and how they are translated into code. Furthermore, in order to be practical, the needed Java libraries are provided, almost eliminating the chance to incur in compilation errors. Of course, a working implementation can be downloaded for those of the reader who prefer not to type more than the essential.

Jose Miguel is a java software developer and open source enthusiast based in London. @jm2dev

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

harrymcc writes "This week's news that Apple is suing Samsung over the similarities of the latter's Galaxy phones and tablets to the iPhone and iPad inspired me to try to document all the court cases involving mobile patents (as well as some related relationships such as licensing agreements) in one infographic. I wonder what sort of technological wonders the companies involved could come up with if they took all the money they're giving to lawyers and spent it on R&D instead?"

Two weeks ago we discussed news that some indie developers had found a way to manipulate ratings for their games on Xbox Live. Now, Microsoft has amended the rating rules so that only Xbox Live Gold members can rate such games through the service's website. "By implementing this change, we believe our customers will experience more consistent ratings and a significantly reduced potential for abuse across the entire Xbox catalog. We have also investigated rolling back suspect votes, however, we determined it will not be possible to do this. In addition, we are investigating users who may have violated their user agreement during this series of events."

1sockchuck writes "We've seen specifications and photos of Facebook's new data center in Oregon. Data Center Knowledge now has video tours of Facebook's server room and cooling system. The tours, conducted by Facebook Director of Datacenter Engineering Jay Park, showcase the Open Compute Project designs for servers, UPS units and two-tier 'penthouse' cooling system design."

1sockchuck writes "We've seen specifications and photos of Facebook's new data center in Oregon. Data Center Knowledge now has video tours of Facebook's server room and cooling system. The tours, conducted by Facebook Director of Datacenter Engineering Jay Park, showcase the Open Compute Project designs for servers, UPS units and two-tier 'penthouse' cooling system design."

Since Oracle has decided to give OpenOffice back to the community, a lot of people wondered if there would be some sort of re-unification with the ex-Oracle and the Document Foundation run by a lot of the original involved folks. The latter has released a statement saying, "the development of TDF community and LibreOffice is going forward as planned, and we are always willing to include new members and partners. We will provide as many information as we can with the progress of the situation. We are currently making every possible effort to offer a smooth transition to the project."

nanoflower followed up on a recent story about the unpredictable future of data storage. That story talked about Western Digital buying Hitachi, leaving just 4 players. Now: "Yet another hard drive company is going by the wayside, as Seagate is buying the Samsung HDD unit. Seagate is buying the unit for $1.375 billion (half in stock, half in cash)."

Technologizer reports on this unwelcome development for used game buyers: "SOCOM 4: US Navy Seals charts a new course in punishing used game buyers, and it’s at once better and worse than the status quo of $10 online passes. As described on the official Playstation Blog, SOCOM 4 will let all players access the game’s multiplayer portion — as it should, because online play has always been SOCOM’s main attraction — but used game buyers will miss out on special guns, game types, and other perks to be added later. To get these features with a used copy of the game, you’ll have to buy a $15 activation code. Sony’s spinning this bundle of features, dubbed 'SOCOM Pro,' as an enhancement for new game buyers, rather than a drawback for used copies. It’s semantics, sure, but it’s also the direction in which these used game restrictions should be going."

angry tapir writes "US Supreme Court justices on Monday questioned whether they should side with Microsoft and weaken the legal standard needed to invalidate a patent, with some justices suggesting there are alternatives to changing established law. The issue arose as part of the case involving Redmond and i4i."

mystikkman writes "In the latest patent suit to hit the smartphone industry, Apple is suing Samsung, alleging the Galaxy line of phones and tablets infringe on a number of Apple's patents. 'Samsung's Galaxy Tab computer tablet also slavishly copies a combination of several elements of the Apple Product Configuration Trade Dress,' Apple says in its suit, noting that Samsung's tablet, like Apple's, uses a similar rectangular design with rounded corners, similar black border and array of icons. Apple previously sued HTC over Android. If Samsung is found to be infringing on the software, all the Android OEMs could be vulnerable."

CWmike writes "Iran's Brigadier General, Gholam Reza Jalali, accused Siemens on Saturday with helping US and Israeli teams craft the Stuxnet worm that attacked his country's nuclear facilities. 'Siemens should explain why and how it provided the enemies with the information about the codes of the SCADA software and prepared the ground for a cyber attack against us,' Jalali told the Islamic Republic News Service. Siemens did not reply to a request for comment on Jalali's accusations. Stuxnet, which first came to light in June 2010 but hit Iranian targets in several waves starting the year before, has been extensively analyzed by security researchers. Symantec and Langner Communications say Stuxnet was designed to infiltrate Iran's nuclear enrichment program, hide in the Iranian SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) control systems that operate its plants, then force gas centrifuge motors to spin at unsafe speeds. Jalali suggested that Iranian officials would pursue Siemens in the courts, and claimed that Iranian researchers traced the attack to Israel and the US. He said information from infected systems was sent to computers in Texas."

CWmike writes "Iran's Brigadier General, Gholam Reza Jalali, accused Siemens on Saturday with helping US and Israeli teams craft the Stuxnet worm that attacked his country's nuclear facilities. 'Siemens should explain why and how it provided the enemies with the information about the codes of the SCADA software and prepared the ground for a cyber attack against us,' Jalali told the Islamic Republic News Service. Siemens did not reply to a request for comment on Jalali's accusations. Stuxnet, which first came to light in June 2010 but hit Iranian targets in several waves starting the year before, has been extensively analyzed by security researchers. Symantec and Langner Communications say Stuxnet was designed to infiltrate Iran's nuclear enrichment program, hide in the Iranian SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) control systems that operate its plants, then force gas centrifuge motors to spin at unsafe speeds. Jalali suggested that Iranian officials would pursue Siemens in the courts, and claimed that Iranian researchers traced the attack to Israel and the US. He said information from infected systems was sent to computers in Texas."

RickJWagner writes "Once upon a time, I thought communication was one of my strong suits. Alas, a few years into my programming career I realized I'm more of the head-down codeslinging type, not one of the schmoozing managerial types. So when I have a point to make, I really like to have my data ready to do the talking for me. In that capacity, this book is a very good weapon to have in my arsenal." Read on for the rest of Rick's review. R Graphs Cookbook author Hrishi Mittal pages 272 publisher Packt Publishing rating 8/10 reviewer RickJWagner ISBN 1849513066 summary An invaluable reference book for expert R users Right away, you should realize this is not a book that teaches R. R (an excellent open source statistical language) is a great tool for any technician. I've used it to analyze logs, find performance bottlenecks, and make sense of mountains of nearly unrecognizable data. But this book doesn't teach R, it teaches R graphing.

It turns out R has excellent graphing capabilities. You can draw scatter plots, line plots, pie graphs, bar charts, histograms, box and whisker plots, heat maps, contour maps and 'regular' maps. These are all good for demonstrating data in different ways, and the book lightly explains which graph will help you illustrate which point.

If you're getting a little interested, you'll also want to know that all this graphing can be scripted and scheduled. So you can get data-driven reports on a schedule, easily accomplished once you know how to write the graphing scripts (which are then scheduled using cron or a similar facility). One small caveat: To prepare your data for presentation, I think it's usually necessary to partner R with another language that's better for text extracting and manipulation. I prefer Python for this task, you might like another language.

The book is exceptionally easy to read and work with. This doesn't mean it's simplistic, though. Anyone who's tangled with R's graphing without a good example will testify that figuring out the various functions and arguments necessary to wrangle a descriptive graph can be really difficult. This book gives you the kind of graphs you need, with the bells and whistles you're going to want, in a series of snippets you can run immediately.

The book is written in Packt's "Recipe" format. In a nutshell, this means that it's a series of how-to sections worded in a templated form. There are headings for sections that inform you what you're going to accomplish, how it's done, and why it worked. You quickly realize it's a repetitive format, but it serves to make the book an excellent resource for quick reference.

Another really nice feature of the book is the downloadable source code and matching data. Knowing the data is half the battle, really. The specific formulas given are certainly useful, but without knowing how the underlying data is formatted you really wouldn't get nearly the practical value. For that reason, I urge anyone using this book to be sure they examine the underlying data for at least the first few formulas. After that, it'll be automatic, you'll know you want to look at that data when you're trying to master some graph type. Then when you go to make your own data ready for graphing, you reach for that secondary language like Python, extract the fields you want in a way similar to your example data set, and presto-- you've got the graph you want.

The book starts out with a first chapter that introduces the kinds of graphs you'll be able to produce and situations where each type is most useful. The next chapters, up until the final one, are in-depth sections on each of the graph types. Maps are treated to a different chapter than pie graphs, for instance. The final chapter covers putting final touches on your graphs, including saving them in different formats (PDF, PNG, JPEG, etc.) and niceties like adding scientific notations, mathematical symbols, etc.

The book states that the target audience is experienced R programmers. I really don't think that's necessary, though. There is an obligatory R installation section, and I think that a reasonably competent programmer with Google at his disposal could get off the ground (for graphing purposes) with this book and a little bumbling. If you already know R, then you needn't worry at all, there is nothing here that will look foreign to you.

If I could change one thing about the book, I'd want a comprehensive index of all the functions and arguments that augment the basic core functions that produce the example graphs. These functions and arguments tweak the basic function in ways that make them much more appealing than what the basic function alone can provide. But the book isn't able to show each and every combination with each graphing function, so it's up to the reader to figure out how to pick some of the options from one recipe and apply it to another. It's not difficult to do, but having an index to help you find the options you want would make this process easier.

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

RickJWagner writes "Once upon a time, I thought communication was one of my strong suits. Alas, a few years into my programming career I realized I'm more of the head-down codeslinging type, not one of the schmoozing managerial types. So when I have a point to make, I really like to have my data ready to do the talking for me. In that capacity, this book is a very good weapon to have in my arsenal." Read on for the rest of Rick's review. R Graphs Cookbook author Hrishi Mittal pages 272 publisher Packt Publishing rating 8/10 reviewer RickJWagner ISBN 1849513066 summary An invaluable reference book for expert R users Right away, you should realize this is not a book that teaches R. R (an excellent open source statistical language) is a great tool for any technician. I've used it to analyze logs, find performance bottlenecks, and make sense of mountains of nearly unrecognizable data. But this book doesn't teach R, it teaches R graphing.

It turns out R has excellent graphing capabilities. You can draw scatter plots, line plots, pie graphs, bar charts, histograms, box and whisker plots, heat maps, contour maps and 'regular' maps. These are all good for demonstrating data in different ways, and the book lightly explains which graph will help you illustrate which point.

If you're getting a little interested, you'll also want to know that all this graphing can be scripted and scheduled. So you can get data-driven reports on a schedule, easily accomplished once you know how to write the graphing scripts (which are then scheduled using cron or a similar facility). One small caveat: To prepare your data for presentation, I think it's usually necessary to partner R with another language that's better for text extracting and manipulation. I prefer Python for this task, you might like another language.

The book is exceptionally easy to read and work with. This doesn't mean it's simplistic, though. Anyone who's tangled with R's graphing without a good example will testify that figuring out the various functions and arguments necessary to wrangle a descriptive graph can be really difficult. This book gives you the kind of graphs you need, with the bells and whistles you're going to want, in a series of snippets you can run immediately.

The book is written in Packt's "Recipe" format. In a nutshell, this means that it's a series of how-to sections worded in a templated form. There are headings for sections that inform you what you're going to accomplish, how it's done, and why it worked. You quickly realize it's a repetitive format, but it serves to make the book an excellent resource for quick reference.

Another really nice feature of the book is the downloadable source code and matching data. Knowing the data is half the battle, really. The specific formulas given are certainly useful, but without knowing how the underlying data is formatted you really wouldn't get nearly the practical value. For that reason, I urge anyone using this book to be sure they examine the underlying data for at least the first few formulas. After that, it'll be automatic, you'll know you want to look at that data when you're trying to master some graph type. Then when you go to make your own data ready for graphing, you reach for that secondary language like Python, extract the fields you want in a way similar to your example data set, and presto-- you've got the graph you want.

The book starts out with a first chapter that introduces the kinds of graphs you'll be able to produce and situations where each type is most useful. The next chapters, up until the final one, are in-depth sections on each of the graph types. Maps are treated to a different chapter than pie graphs, for instance. The final chapter covers putting final touches on your graphs, including saving them in different formats (PDF, PNG, JPEG, etc.) and niceties like adding scientific notations, mathematical symbols, etc.

The book states that the target audience is experienced R programmers. I really don't think that's necessary, though. There is an obligatory R installation section, and I think that a reasonably competent programmer with Google at his disposal could get off the ground (for graphing purposes) with this book and a little bumbling. If you already know R, then you needn't worry at all, there is nothing here that will look foreign to you.

If I could change one thing about the book, I'd want a comprehensive index of all the functions and arguments that augment the basic core functions that produce the example graphs. These functions and arguments tweak the basic function in ways that make them much more appealing than what the basic function alone can provide. But the book isn't able to show each and every combination with each graphing function, so it's up to the reader to figure out how to pick some of the options from one recipe and apply it to another. It's not difficult to do, but having an index to help you find the options you want would make this process easier.

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

alphadogg writes "One day after a hacker posted screen shots and data to a hacking mailing list, saying he had broken into a New Mexico wind turbine facility, the company that runs the turbines says it has seen no evidence of a computer intrusion. The hacker, who calls himself Bigr R, made the claims Saturday, posting screenshots of the facility's management interface, screenshots of an FTP server and project management system, as well as Web server info and configuration data from a Cisco router."

An anonymous reader writes "Robert Scoble has published fantastic photo tour of Facebook's new open source data center. This datacenter is the most energy efficient in the world. The Google and other datacenters are pushing back against new efficiency requirements for a while, and an open source competitor will only make things better for the rest of us."

An anonymous reader writes "Today marks the 5th annual Record Store Day, a celebration of independent record stores. As a music lover, I think this day is of dire importance." I know Free Comic Book Day (for 2011, that's May 7) has gotten a lot of people into comic stores who otherwise wouldn't — partly because of the many free comics given away — but hadn't heard of the record-store equivalent. It'd be nice for record stories to give away tons of 7" vinyl promos.

An anonymous reader writes "Today marks the 5th annual Record Store Day, a celebration of independent record stores. As a music lover, I think this day is of dire importance." I know Free Comic Book Day (for 2011, that's May 7) has gotten a lot of people into comic stores who otherwise wouldn't — partly because of the many free comics given away — but hadn't heard of the record-store equivalent. It'd be nice for record stories to give away tons of 7" vinyl promos.

An anonymous reader writes "Today marks the 5th annual Record Store Day, a celebration of independent record stores. As a music lover, I think this day is of dire importance." I know Free Comic Book Day (for 2011, that's May 7) has gotten a lot of people into comic stores who otherwise wouldn't — partly because of the many free comics given away — but hadn't heard of the record-store equivalent. It'd be nice for record stories to give away tons of 7" vinyl promos.

suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: "Garen Meguerian and a team of lawyers are taking Apple to task for 'inducing' children to spend hundreds of dollars of their parents' money on in-app game purchases. Meguerian filed a class-action lawsuit this week in California, acknowledging that Apple has already addressed the problem, but saying that the company continues to unfairly profit from sales of virtual 'smurfberries' and 'fish bucks.' The issue at hand is related to games that rely on a 'freemium' business model, giving away the game for free on the App Store and relying on in-app purchases of virtual currency, extra levels, or other add-ons as a revenue stream."

vellorean writes "I have been reading Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook by Sarath Lakshman, published by Packt, for a while. While most people I know learn shell scripts themselves, I was looking to refresh my concepts a little as well as have a reference lying around on the table for fast access." Read below for the rest of vellorean's review. Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook author Sarath Lakshman pages 360 publisher Packt Publishing rating 9 reviewer Kumar Appaiah ISBN 1849513767 summary A book for beginners and intermediates, which introduces shell scripting and proceeds to provide several practical real-world recipes of useful shell scripts First of all, let me remark by saying that shell scripting is something learned more on a need basis than as a tool to solve the main problem. People would seldom write shell scripts as standalone programs (exceptions exist). However, what makes shell scripting invaluable to know is the fact that knowing some tricks can save several minutes, or hours, of work by automating and simplifying certain tasks, generally (but not restricted to) file management and data processing. Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook does go quite far in pursuing this goal, and is appropriate for both beginners who are looking to gain dexterity in shell scripting, as well as intermediate users who wish to polish their skills. The book also can double up as a quick reference, though I would argue that the "Advanced Bash Scripting Guide" would suit that more.

At the outset, the author clarifies that the focus will be on Bash. This, people may or may not like, but the fact that bash has become ubiquitous in terms of the available shells on Unix-like systems today, starting out with bash is not a bad thing to do. Besides, learning other shell scripting languages while knowing bash isn't too hard, since the paradigm remains the same.

The book is organized into chapters based more on utility than scripting concepts themselves, although the language aspects are brought onto the reader gradually. For instance, the examples in the first chapter focus more on the basic data elements (variables, arrays, functions etc.) as well as operators (for numbers, files etc.), and all the examples demonstrate simple usage of these concepts, and he further chapters build upon these in a gradual manner.

At the same time, if he reader has some familiarity with shell scripting and needs to only refresh or learn a certain concept, he/she needs to just read the relevant chapter. It is not too difficult to grasp the examples of the later chapters, provided some basic shell knowledge is assumed.

A positive trait in the presentation of this book is that it is all based on practical everyday examples which, with minor adaptation, can be used by many for their own daily tasks. For instance, there are several examples which describe searching for and processing files, which, I'd imagine, many users would want to do on a regular basis. Thus, providing realistic examples allows the book to double its utility. The language and approach used is simple and conversational, and the presentation is very clear, with each idea being described as a problem statement followed by a "How to do it" section with the actual code, and ending with a discussion of the nitty-gritties of the code. It is easy to go for a quick scan for those in a hurry, while those who with to read in more detail will not be disappointed either.

The book also covers a wide array of applications. For instance, there are examples on automating fetching web pages and processing them, demonstrations of parsing and simplifying and even some queries around databases wrapped around in shell. It also spans to utilities and tasks connected to statistics, backups, compression, version control and many more.

The book goes into a fair amount of detail in terms of describing the shell scripting concept under consideration. The examples used go into a fair amount of detail in order to describe to the user all the aspects involved in the method or command being used. The concepts described are fairly complete, and would be sufficient for the reader to use immediately or with just a little bit of fine tuning. In terms of breadth, the book covers most of the features of shell scripting while also describing the various facilities the shell provides access to in a Unix-like environment. Thus, the book does not disappoint in this front either.

In summary, probably the only thing I'd have liked to see more of is some emphasis on how to write more efficient shell scripts. Granted, most of the shell scripts described in the book are very simple and succinct, but a some words on how loops can be made better, or how to spot situations where pipes are not needed to solve a problem etc. might have been a nice addition. Some explanation of differences with dash, tcsh, zsh etc. might also have been nice, since a lot of users have different default shells. But all this isn't going to prevent me from giving this book a high rating, since it delivers quite well on the promises it makes at the beginning.

This is definitely a good book to have near your desk, and kudos to the author for having taken the effort to put it together. I would highly recommend it to the beginner and occasional shell user for a thorough read, and to an intermediate to have on his/her desk for borrowing the cool scripting ideas and applications the author has written in this book.

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

vellorean writes "I have been reading Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook by Sarath Lakshman, published by Packt, for a while. While most people I know learn shell scripts themselves, I was looking to refresh my concepts a little as well as have a reference lying around on the table for fast access." Read below for the rest of vellorean's review. Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook author Sarath Lakshman pages 360 publisher Packt Publishing rating 9 reviewer Kumar Appaiah ISBN 1849513767 summary A book for beginners and intermediates, which introduces shell scripting and proceeds to provide several practical real-world recipes of useful shell scripts First of all, let me remark by saying that shell scripting is something learned more on a need basis than as a tool to solve the main problem. People would seldom write shell scripts as standalone programs (exceptions exist). However, what makes shell scripting invaluable to know is the fact that knowing some tricks can save several minutes, or hours, of work by automating and simplifying certain tasks, generally (but not restricted to) file management and data processing. Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook does go quite far in pursuing this goal, and is appropriate for both beginners who are looking to gain dexterity in shell scripting, as well as intermediate users who wish to polish their skills. The book also can double up as a quick reference, though I would argue that the "Advanced Bash Scripting Guide" would suit that more.

At the outset, the author clarifies that the focus will be on Bash. This, people may or may not like, but the fact that bash has become ubiquitous in terms of the available shells on Unix-like systems today, starting out with bash is not a bad thing to do. Besides, learning other shell scripting languages while knowing bash isn't too hard, since the paradigm remains the same.

The book is organized into chapters based more on utility than scripting concepts themselves, although the language aspects are brought onto the reader gradually. For instance, the examples in the first chapter focus more on the basic data elements (variables, arrays, functions etc.) as well as operators (for numbers, files etc.), and all the examples demonstrate simple usage of these concepts, and he further chapters build upon these in a gradual manner.

At the same time, if he reader has some familiarity with shell scripting and needs to only refresh or learn a certain concept, he/she needs to just read the relevant chapter. It is not too difficult to grasp the examples of the later chapters, provided some basic shell knowledge is assumed.

A positive trait in the presentation of this book is that it is all based on practical everyday examples which, with minor adaptation, can be used by many for their own daily tasks. For instance, there are several examples which describe searching for and processing files, which, I'd imagine, many users would want to do on a regular basis. Thus, providing realistic examples allows the book to double its utility. The language and approach used is simple and conversational, and the presentation is very clear, with each idea being described as a problem statement followed by a "How to do it" section with the actual code, and ending with a discussion of the nitty-gritties of the code. It is easy to go for a quick scan for those in a hurry, while those who with to read in more detail will not be disappointed either.

The book also covers a wide array of applications. For instance, there are examples on automating fetching web pages and processing them, demonstrations of parsing and simplifying and even some queries around databases wrapped around in shell. It also spans to utilities and tasks connected to statistics, backups, compression, version control and many more.

The book goes into a fair amount of detail in terms of describing the shell scripting concept under consideration. The examples used go into a fair amount of detail in order to describe to the user all the aspects involved in the method or command being used. The concepts described are fairly complete, and would be sufficient for the reader to use immediately or with just a little bit of fine tuning. In terms of breadth, the book covers most of the features of shell scripting while also describing the various facilities the shell provides access to in a Unix-like environment. Thus, the book does not disappoint in this front either.

In summary, probably the only thing I'd have liked to see more of is some emphasis on how to write more efficient shell scripts. Granted, most of the shell scripts described in the book are very simple and succinct, but a some words on how loops can be made better, or how to spot situations where pipes are not needed to solve a problem etc. might have been a nice addition. Some explanation of differences with dash, tcsh, zsh etc. might also have been nice, since a lot of users have different default shells. But all this isn't going to prevent me from giving this book a high rating, since it delivers quite well on the promises it makes at the beginning.

This is definitely a good book to have near your desk, and kudos to the author for having taken the effort to put it together. I would highly recommend it to the beginner and occasional shell user for a thorough read, and to an intermediate to have on his/her desk for borrowing the cool scripting ideas and applications the author has written in this book.

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

Frequent contributor Bennett Haselton is back with an article about how sites with huge amounts of user-generated content struggle to deal with abuse complaints, and could benefit from a crowd-sourced policing system similar to Slashdot's meta-moderation. He writes "In The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov cites examples of online mobs that filed phony abuse complaints in order to shut down pro-democracy Facebook groups and YouTube videos criticizing the Saudi royal family. I've got an idea for an algorithm that would help solve the problem, and I'm offering $100 (or a donation to a charity of your choice) for the best suggested improvement, or alternative, or criticism of the idea proposed in this article." Hit the link below to read the rest of his thoughts.

Before you get bored and click away: I'm proposing an algorithm for Facebook (and similar sites) to use to review "abuse reports" in a scalable and efficient manner, and I'm offering a total of $100 (or more) to the reader (or to some charity designated by them) who proposes the best improvement(s) or alternative(s) to the algorithm. We now proceed with your standard boilerplate introductory paragraph.

In his new book The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, Evgeny Morozov cites examples of Facebook users organizing campaigns to shut down particular groups or user account by filing phony complaints against them. One Hong-Kong-based Facebook group with over 80,000 members, formed to oppose the pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong-Kong, was shut down by opponents flagging the group as "abusive" on Facebook. In another incident, the Moroccan activist Kacem El Ghazzali found his Facebook group Youth for the Separation between Religion and Education deleted without explanation, and when he e-mailed Facebook to ask why, his personal Facebook profile got canned as well. Only after an international outcry did Facebook restore the group (but, oddly, not El Ghazzali's personal Facebook account), but they refused to explain the original removal; the most likely cause was a torrent of phony "complaints" from opponents. In both cases it seemed clear that the groups did not actually violate Facebook's Terms of Service, but the number of complaints presumably convinced either a software algorithm or an overworked human reviewer that something must have been inappropriate, and the forums were shut down. The Net Delusion also describes a group of conservative Saudi citizens calling themselves "Saudi Flagger" that coordinates filing en masse complaints against YouTube videos which criticize Islam or the Saudi royal family.

A large number of abuse reports against a single Facebook group or YouTube video probably has a good chance of triggering a takedown; with 2,000 employees managing 500 million users, Facebook surely doesn't have time to review every abuse report properly. About once a month I still get an email from Facebook with the subject "Facebook Warning" saying:

You have been sending harassing messages to other users. This is a violation of Facebook's Terms of Use. Among other things, messages that are hateful, threatening, or obscene are not allowed. Continued misuse of Facebook's features could result in your account being disabled.

I still have no idea what is triggering the "warnings"; the meanest thing I usually say on Facebook is to people who write to me asking for tech support (usually with the proxy sites to get on Facebook at school), when they say "It gives me an error", and I write back, "TELL ME THE ACTUAL ERROR MESSAGE THAT IT GIVES YOU!!" (Typical reply: "It gave me an error that it can't do it." If you work in tech support, I feel your pain.) I suspect the "abuse reports" are probably coming from parents who hack into their teenagers' accounts, see their teens corresponding with me about how to get on Facebook or YouTube at school, and decide to file an "abuse report" against my account just for the hell of it. If Facebook makes it that easy for a lone gunman to cause trouble with fake complaints, imagine how much trouble you can make with a well-coordinated mob.

But I think an algorithm could be implemented that would enable users to police for genuinely abusive content, without allowing hordes of vigilantes to get content removed that they simply don't like. Taking Facebook as an example, a simple change in the crowdsourcing algorithm could solve the whole problem: use the votes of users who are randomly selected by Facebook, rather than users who self-select by filing the abuse reports. This is similar to an algorithm I'd suggested for stopping vigilante campaigns from "burying" legitimate content on Digg (and indeed, stopping illegitimate self-promotion on Digg at the same time), and as an general algorithm for preventing good ideas from being lost in the glut of competing online content. But if phone "abuse reports" are also being used to squelch free speech in countries like China and Saudi Arabia, then the moral case for solving the problem is all that more compelling.

Here's how the algorithm would work: Facebook can ask some random fraction of their users, "Would you like to be a volunteer reviewer of abuse reports?" (Would you sign up? Come on. Wouldn't you be a little bit curious what sort of interesting stuff would be brought to your attention?) Wait until they've built up a roster of reviewers (say, 20,000). Then suppose Facebook receives an abuse report (or several abuse reports, whatever their threshold is) about a particular Facebook group. Facebook can then randomly select some subset of its volunteer reviewers, say, 100 of them. This is tiny as a proportion of the total number of reviewers (with a "jury" size of 100 and a "jury pool" of 20,000, a given reviewer has only a 1 in 200 chance of being called for "jury duty" for any particular complaint), but still large enough that the results are statistically significant. Tell them, "This is the content that users have been complaining about, and here is the reason that they say it violates our terms of service. Are these legitimate complaints, or not?" If the number of "Yes" votes exceeds some threshold, then the group gets shuttered.

It's much harder to cheat in this system, than in an "abuse report" system in which users simply band together and file phony abuse reports against a group until it gets taken down. If the 200 members of "Saudi Flagger" signed up as volunteer reviewers, then they would comprise only 1% of a jury pool of 20,000 users, and on average would only get one vote on a jury of 100. You'd have to organize such a large mob that your numbers would comprise a significant portion of the 20,000 volunteer reviewers, so that you would have a significant voting bloc in a given jury pool. (And my guess is that Facebook would have a lot more than 20,000 curious volunteers signed up as reviewers.) On the other hand, if someone creates a group with actual hateful content or built around a campaign of illegal harrassment, and the abuse reports start coming in until a jury vote is triggered, then a randomly selected jury of reviewers would probably cast enough "Yes" votes to validate the abuse reports.

Jurors could in fact be given three voting choices:

• "This group really is abusive" (i.e. the abuse reports were legitimate), or;
• "This group does not technically violate the Terms of Service, but the users who filed abuse reports were probably making an honest mistake" (perhaps a common choice for groups that support controversial causes, or that publish information about semi-private individuals); or
• "This group does not violate the TOS, and the abuse reports were bogus to begin with" (i.e. almost no reasonable person could have believed that the group really did violate the TOS, and the abuse reports were probably part of an organized campaign to get the group removed).

This strongly discourages users from organizing mob efforts against legitimate groups; if most of the jury ends up voting for the third choice, "This is an obviously legitimate group and the complaints were just an organized vigilante campaign", then the users who filed the complaints could have their own accounts penalized.

What I like about this algorithm is that the sizes and thresholds can be tweaked according to what you discover about the habits of the Facebook content reviewers. Suppose most volunteer reviewers turn out to be deadbeats who don't respond to "jury duty" when they're actually called upon to vote in an abuse report case. Fine — just increase the size of the jury, until the average number of users in a randomly convened jury who do respond, is large enough to be statistically significant. Or, suppose it turns out that people who sign up to review content to be deleted, are a more prudish bunch than average, and their votes tend to skew towards "delete it now!" in a way that is not representative of the general Facebook community. Fine — just raise the threshold for the percentage of "Yes" votes required to get content deleted. All that's required for the algorithm to work, is that content which clearly does violate the Terms of Service, gets more "Yes" votes on average than content that doesn't. Then make the jury size large enough that the voting results are statistically significant, so you can tell which side of the threshold you're on.

Another beneficial feature of the algorithm is that it's scaleable — there's no bottleneck of overworked reviewers at Facebook headquarters who have to review every decision. (They should probably review a random subset of the decisions to make sure the "juries" are getting what seems to be the right answer, but they don't have to check every one.) If Facebook doubles in size — and the amount of "abusive content" and the number of abuse reports doubles along with it — then as long as the pool of volunteers reviewers also doubles, each reviewer has no greater workload than they had before. But the workload of the abuse department at Facebook doesn't double.

Now, this algorithm ducks the question of how to handle "borderline" content. If a student creates a Facebook group called "MR. LANGAN IS A BUTT BRAIN," is that "harassment" or not? I would say no, but I'm not confident that a randomly selected pool of reviewers would agree. However, the point of this algorithm is to make sure that if content is posted on Facebook that almost nobody would reasonably agree is a violation of their Terms of Service, then a group of vigilantes can't get it removed by filing a torrent of abuse reports.

Also, this proposal can't do much about Facebook's Terms of Service being prudish to begin with. A Frenchman recently had his account suspended because he used a 19th-century oil painting of an artistic nude as his profile picture. Well, Facebook's TOS prohibits nudity -- not just sexual nudity, but all nudity, period. Even under my proposed algorithm, jurors would presumably have to be honest and vote that the painting did in fact violate Facebook's TOS, unless or until Facebook changes the rules. (For that matter, maybe this wasn't a case of prudishness anyway. I mean, we know it's "artistic" because it's more than 100 years old and it was painted in oils, right? Yeah, well check out the painting that the guy used as his profile picture. It presumably didn't help that the painting is so good that the Facebook censors probably thought it was a photograph.)

But notwithstanding these problems, this algorithm was the best trade-off I could come up with in terms of scalability and fairness. So here's the contest: Send me your best alternative, or best suggested improvement, or best fatal flaw in this proposal (even if you don't come up with something better, the discovery of a fatal flaw is still valuable) for a chance to win (a portion of) the $100 -- or, you can designate a charity to be the recipient of your winnings. Send your ideas to bennett at peacefire dot org and put "reporting" in the subject line. I reserve the right to split the prize between multiple winners, or to pay out more than the original $100 (or give winners the right to designate charitable donations totalling more than $100) if enough good points come in (or to pay out less than $100 if there's a real dearth of valid points, but there are enough brainiacs reading this that I think that's unlikely). In order for the contest not to detract from the discussion taking place in the comment threads, if more than one reader submits essentially the same idea, I'll give the credit to the first submitter -- so as you're sending me your idea, you can feel free to share it in the comment threads as well without worrying about someone re-submitting it and stealing a portion of your winnings. (If your submission is, "Bennett, your articles would be much shorter if you just state your conclusion, instead of also including a supporting argument and addressing possible objections", feel free to submit that just in the comment threads.)

In The Net Delusion, Morozov concludes his section on phony abuse reports by saying, "Good judgment, as it turns out, cannot be crowdsourced, if only because special interests always steer the process to suit their own objectives." I think he's right about the problems, but I disagree that they're unsolvable. I think my algorithm does in fact prevent "special interests" from "steering the process", but I'll pay to be convinced that I'm wrong. Today I'm just choosing the "winners" of the contest myself; maybe someday I'll crowdsource the decision by letting a randomly selected subset of users vote on the merits of each proposal... but I'm sure some of you are dying to tell me why that's a bad idea.

Frequent contributor Bennett Haselton is back with an article about how sites with huge amounts of user-generated content struggle to deal with abuse complaints, and could benefit from a crowd-sourced policing system similar to Slashdot's meta-moderation. He writes "In The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov cites examples of online mobs that filed phony abuse complaints in order to shut down pro-democracy Facebook groups and YouTube videos criticizing the Saudi royal family. I've got an idea for an algorithm that would help solve the problem, and I'm offering $100 (or a donation to a charity of your choice) for the best suggested improvement, or alternative, or criticism of the idea proposed in this article." Hit the link below to read the rest of his thoughts.

Before you get bored and click away: I'm proposing an algorithm for Facebook (and similar sites) to use to review "abuse reports" in a scalable and efficient manner, and I'm offering a total of $100 (or more) to the reader (or to some charity designated by them) who proposes the best improvement(s) or alternative(s) to the algorithm. We now proceed with your standard boilerplate introductory paragraph.

In his new book The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, Evgeny Morozov cites examples of Facebook users organizing campaigns to shut down particular groups or user account by filing phony complaints against them. One Hong-Kong-based Facebook group with over 80,000 members, formed to oppose the pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong-Kong, was shut down by opponents flagging the group as "abusive" on Facebook. In another incident, the Moroccan activist Kacem El Ghazzali found his Facebook group Youth for the Separation between Religion and Education deleted without explanation, and when he e-mailed Facebook to ask why, his personal Facebook profile got canned as well. Only after an international outcry did Facebook restore the group (but, oddly, not El Ghazzali's personal Facebook account), but they refused to explain the original removal; the most likely cause was a torrent of phony "complaints" from opponents. In both cases it seemed clear that the groups did not actually violate Facebook's Terms of Service, but the number of complaints presumably convinced either a software algorithm or an overworked human reviewer that something must have been inappropriate, and the forums were shut down. The Net Delusion also describes a group of conservative Saudi citizens calling themselves "Saudi Flagger" that coordinates filing en masse complaints against YouTube videos which criticize Islam or the Saudi royal family.

A large number of abuse reports against a single Facebook group or YouTube video probably has a good chance of triggering a takedown; with 2,000 employees managing 500 million users, Facebook surely doesn't have time to review every abuse report properly. About once a month I still get an email from Facebook with the subject "Facebook Warning" saying:

You have been sending harassing messages to other users. This is a violation of Facebook's Terms of Use. Among other things, messages that are hateful, threatening, or obscene are not allowed. Continued misuse of Facebook's features could result in your account being disabled.

I still have no idea what is triggering the "warnings"; the meanest thing I usually say on Facebook is to people who write to me asking for tech support (usually with the proxy sites to get on Facebook at school), when they say "It gives me an error", and I write back, "TELL ME THE ACTUAL ERROR MESSAGE THAT IT GIVES YOU!!" (Typical reply: "It gave me an error that it can't do it." If you work in tech support, I feel your pain.) I suspect the "abuse reports" are probably coming from parents who hack into their teenagers' accounts, see their teens corresponding with me about how to get on Facebook or YouTube at school, and decide to file an "abuse report" against my account just for the hell of it. If Facebook makes it that easy for a lone gunman to cause trouble with fake complaints, imagine how much trouble you can make with a well-coordinated mob.

But I think an algorithm could be implemented that would enable users to police for genuinely abusive content, without allowing hordes of vigilantes to get content removed that they simply don't like. Taking Facebook as an example, a simple change in the crowdsourcing algorithm could solve the whole problem: use the votes of users who are randomly selected by Facebook, rather than users who self-select by filing the abuse reports. This is similar to an algorithm I'd suggested for stopping vigilante campaigns from "burying" legitimate content on Digg (and indeed, stopping illegitimate self-promotion on Digg at the same time), and as an general algorithm for preventing good ideas from being lost in the glut of competing online content. But if phone "abuse reports" are also being used to squelch free speech in countries like China and Saudi Arabia, then the moral case for solving the problem is all that more compelling.

Here's how the algorithm would work: Facebook can ask some random fraction of their users, "Would you like to be a volunteer reviewer of abuse reports?" (Would you sign up? Come on. Wouldn't you be a little bit curious what sort of interesting stuff would be brought to your attention?) Wait until they've built up a roster of reviewers (say, 20,000). Then suppose Facebook receives an abuse report (or several abuse reports, whatever their threshold is) about a particular Facebook group. Facebook can then randomly select some subset of its volunteer reviewers, say, 100 of them. This is tiny as a proportion of the total number of reviewers (with a "jury" size of 100 and a "jury pool" of 20,000, a given reviewer has only a 1 in 200 chance of being called for "jury duty" for any particular complaint), but still large enough that the results are statistically significant. Tell them, "This is the content that users have been complaining about, and here is the reason that they say it violates our terms of service. Are these legitimate complaints, or not?" If the number of "Yes" votes exceeds some threshold, then the group gets shuttered.

It's much harder to cheat in this system, than in an "abuse report" system in which users simply band together and file phony abuse reports against a group until it gets taken down. If the 200 members of "Saudi Flagger" signed up as volunteer reviewers, then they would comprise only 1% of a jury pool of 20,000 users, and on average would only get one vote on a jury of 100. You'd have to organize such a large mob that your numbers would comprise a significant portion of the 20,000 volunteer reviewers, so that you would have a significant voting bloc in a given jury pool. (And my guess is that Facebook would have a lot more than 20,000 curious volunteers signed up as reviewers.) On the other hand, if someone creates a group with actual hateful content or built around a campaign of illegal harrassment, and the abuse reports start coming in until a jury vote is triggered, then a randomly selected jury of reviewers would probably cast enough "Yes" votes to validate the abuse reports.

Jurors could in fact be given three voting choices:

• "This group really is abusive" (i.e. the abuse reports were legitimate), or;
• "This group does not technically violate the Terms of Service, but the users who filed abuse reports were probably making an honest mistake" (perhaps a common choice for groups that support controversial causes, or that publish information about semi-private individuals); or
• "This group does not violate the TOS, and the abuse reports were bogus to begin with" (i.e. almost no reasonable person could have believed that the group really did violate the TOS, and the abuse reports were probably part of an organized campaign to get the group removed).

This strongly discourages users from organizing mob efforts against legitimate groups; if most of the jury ends up voting for the third choice, "This is an obviously legitimate group and the complaints were just an organized vigilante campaign", then the users who filed the complaints could have their own accounts penalized.

What I like about this algorithm is that the sizes and thresholds can be tweaked according to what you discover about the habits of the Facebook content reviewers. Suppose most volunteer reviewers turn out to be deadbeats who don't respond to "jury duty" when they're actually called upon to vote in an abuse report case. Fine — just increase the size of the jury, until the average number of users in a randomly convened jury who do respond, is large enough to be statistically significant. Or, suppose it turns out that people who sign up to review content to be deleted, are a more prudish bunch than average, and their votes tend to skew towards "delete it now!" in a way that is not representative of the general Facebook community. Fine — just raise the threshold for the percentage of "Yes" votes required to get content deleted. All that's required for the algorithm to work, is that content which clearly does violate the Terms of Service, gets more "Yes" votes on average than content that doesn't. Then make the jury size large enough that the voting results are statistically significant, so you can tell which side of the threshold you're on.

Another beneficial feature of the algorithm is that it's scaleable — there's no bottleneck of overworked reviewers at Facebook headquarters who have to review every decision. (They should probably review a random subset of the decisions to make sure the "juries" are getting what seems to be the right answer, but they don't have to check every one.) If Facebook doubles in size — and the amount of "abusive content" and the number of abuse reports doubles along with it — then as long as the pool of volunteers reviewers also doubles, each reviewer has no greater workload than they had before. But the workload of the abuse department at Facebook doesn't double.

Now, this algorithm ducks the question of how to handle "borderline" content. If a student creates a Facebook group called "MR. LANGAN IS A BUTT BRAIN," is that "harassment" or not? I would say no, but I'm not confident that a randomly selected pool of reviewers would agree. However, the point of this algorithm is to make sure that if content is posted on Facebook that almost nobody would reasonably agree is a violation of their Terms of Service, then a group of vigilantes can't get it removed by filing a torrent of abuse reports.

Also, this proposal can't do much about Facebook's Terms of Service being prudish to begin with. A Frenchman recently had his account suspended because he used a 19th-century oil painting of an artistic nude as his profile picture. Well, Facebook's TOS prohibits nudity -- not just sexual nudity, but all nudity, period. Even under my proposed algorithm, jurors would presumably have to be honest and vote that the painting did in fact violate Facebook's TOS, unless or until Facebook changes the rules. (For that matter, maybe this wasn't a case of prudishness anyway. I mean, we know it's "artistic" because it's more than 100 years old and it was painted in oils, right? Yeah, well check out the painting that the guy used as his profile picture. It presumably didn't help that the painting is so good that the Facebook censors probably thought it was a photograph.)

But notwithstanding these problems, this algorithm was the best trade-off I could come up with in terms of scalability and fairness. So here's the contest: Send me your best alternative, or best suggested improvement, or best fatal flaw in this proposal (even if you don't come up with something better, the discovery of a fatal flaw is still valuable) for a chance to win (a portion of) the $100 -- or, you can designate a charity to be the recipient of your winnings. Send your ideas to bennett at peacefire dot org and put "reporting" in the subject line. I reserve the right to split the prize between multiple winners, or to pay out more than the original $100 (or give winners the right to designate charitable donations totalling more than $100) if enough good points come in (or to pay out less than $100 if there's a real dearth of valid points, but there are enough brainiacs reading this that I think that's unlikely). In order for the contest not to detract from the discussion taking place in the comment threads, if more than one reader submits essentially the same idea, I'll give the credit to the first submitter -- so as you're sending me your idea, you can feel free to share it in the comment threads as well without worrying about someone re-submitting it and stealing a portion of your winnings. (If your submission is, "Bennett, your articles would be much shorter if you just state your conclusion, instead of also including a supporting argument and addressing possible objections", feel free to submit that just in the comment threads.)

In The Net Delusion, Morozov concludes his section on phony abuse reports by saying, "Good judgment, as it turns out, cannot be crowdsourced, if only because special interests always steer the process to suit their own objectives." I think he's right about the problems, but I disagree that they're unsolvable. I think my algorithm does in fact prevent "special interests" from "steering the process", but I'll pay to be convinced that I'm wrong. Today I'm just choosing the "winners" of the contest myself; maybe someday I'll crowdsource the decision by letting a randomly selected subset of users vote on the merits of each proposal... but I'm sure some of you are dying to tell me why that's a bad idea.

Frequent contributor Bennett Haselton is back with an article about how sites with huge amounts of user-generated content struggle to deal with abuse complaints, and could benefit from a crowd-sourced policing system similar to Slashdot's meta-moderation. He writes "In The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov cites examples of online mobs that filed phony abuse complaints in order to shut down pro-democracy Facebook groups and YouTube videos criticizing the Saudi royal family. I've got an idea for an algorithm that would help solve the problem, and I'm offering $100 (or a donation to a charity of your choice) for the best suggested improvement, or alternative, or criticism of the idea proposed in this article." Hit the link below to read the rest of his thoughts.

Before you get bored and click away: I'm proposing an algorithm for Facebook (and similar sites) to use to review "abuse reports" in a scalable and efficient manner, and I'm offering a total of $100 (or more) to the reader (or to some charity designated by them) who proposes the best improvement(s) or alternative(s) to the algorithm. We now proceed with your standard boilerplate introductory paragraph.

In his new book The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, Evgeny Morozov cites examples of Facebook users organizing campaigns to shut down particular groups or user account by filing phony complaints against them. One Hong-Kong-based Facebook group with over 80,000 members, formed to oppose the pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong-Kong, was shut down by opponents flagging the group as "abusive" on Facebook. In another incident, the Moroccan activist Kacem El Ghazzali found his Facebook group Youth for the Separation between Religion and Education deleted without explanation, and when he e-mailed Facebook to ask why, his personal Facebook profile got canned as well. Only after an international outcry did Facebook restore the group (but, oddly, not El Ghazzali's personal Facebook account), but they refused to explain the original removal; the most likely cause was a torrent of phony "complaints" from opponents. In both cases it seemed clear that the groups did not actually violate Facebook's Terms of Service, but the number of complaints presumably convinced either a software algorithm or an overworked human reviewer that something must have been inappropriate, and the forums were shut down. The Net Delusion also describes a group of conservative Saudi citizens calling themselves "Saudi Flagger" that coordinates filing en masse complaints against YouTube videos which criticize Islam or the Saudi royal family.

A large number of abuse reports against a single Facebook group or YouTube video probably has a good chance of triggering a takedown; with 2,000 employees managing 500 million users, Facebook surely doesn't have time to review every abuse report properly. About once a month I still get an email from Facebook with the subject "Facebook Warning" saying:

You have been sending harassing messages to other users. This is a violation of Facebook's Terms of Use. Among other things, messages that are hateful, threatening, or obscene are not allowed. Continued misuse of Facebook's features could result in your account being disabled.

I still have no idea what is triggering the "warnings"; the meanest thing I usually say on Facebook is to people who write to me asking for tech support (usually with the proxy sites to get on Facebook at school), when they say "It gives me an error", and I write back, "TELL ME THE ACTUAL ERROR MESSAGE THAT IT GIVES YOU!!" (Typical reply: "It gave me an error that it can't do it." If you work in tech support, I feel your pain.) I suspect the "abuse reports" are probably coming from parents who hack into their teenagers' accounts, see their teens corresponding with me about how to get on Facebook or YouTube at school, and decide to file an "abuse report" against my account just for the hell of it. If Facebook makes it that easy for a lone gunman to cause trouble with fake complaints, imagine how much trouble you can make with a well-coordinated mob.

But I think an algorithm could be implemented that would enable users to police for genuinely abusive content, without allowing hordes of vigilantes to get content removed that they simply don't like. Taking Facebook as an example, a simple change in the crowdsourcing algorithm could solve the whole problem: use the votes of users who are randomly selected by Facebook, rather than users who self-select by filing the abuse reports. This is similar to an algorithm I'd suggested for stopping vigilante campaigns from "burying" legitimate content on Digg (and indeed, stopping illegitimate self-promotion on Digg at the same time), and as an general algorithm for preventing good ideas from being lost in the glut of competing online content. But if phone "abuse reports" are also being used to squelch free speech in countries like China and Saudi Arabia, then the moral case for solving the problem is all that more compelling.

Here's how the algorithm would work: Facebook can ask some random fraction of their users, "Would you like to be a volunteer reviewer of abuse reports?" (Would you sign up? Come on. Wouldn't you be a little bit curious what sort of interesting stuff would be brought to your attention?) Wait until they've built up a roster of reviewers (say, 20,000). Then suppose Facebook receives an abuse report (or several abuse reports, whatever their threshold is) about a particular Facebook group. Facebook can then randomly select some subset of its volunteer reviewers, say, 100 of them. This is tiny as a proportion of the total number of reviewers (with a "jury" size of 100 and a "jury pool" of 20,000, a given reviewer has only a 1 in 200 chance of being called for "jury duty" for any particular complaint), but still large enough that the results are statistically significant. Tell them, "This is the content that users have been complaining about, and here is the reason that they say it violates our terms of service. Are these legitimate complaints, or not?" If the number of "Yes" votes exceeds some threshold, then the group gets shuttered.

It's much harder to cheat in this system, than in an "abuse report" system in which users simply band together and file phony abuse reports against a group until it gets taken down. If the 200 members of "Saudi Flagger" signed up as volunteer reviewers, then they would comprise only 1% of a jury pool of 20,000 users, and on average would only get one vote on a jury of 100. You'd have to organize such a large mob that your numbers would comprise a significant portion of the 20,000 volunteer reviewers, so that you would have a significant voting bloc in a given jury pool. (And my guess is that Facebook would have a lot more than 20,000 curious volunteers signed up as reviewers.) On the other hand, if someone creates a group with actual hateful content or built around a campaign of illegal harrassment, and the abuse reports start coming in until a jury vote is triggered, then a randomly selected jury of reviewers would probably cast enough "Yes" votes to validate the abuse reports.

Jurors could in fact be given three voting choices:

• "This group really is abusive" (i.e. the abuse reports were legitimate), or;
• "This group does not technically violate the Terms of Service, but the users who filed abuse reports were probably making an honest mistake" (perhaps a common choice for groups that support controversial causes, or that publish information about semi-private individuals); or
• "This group does not violate the TOS, and the abuse reports were bogus to begin with" (i.e. almost no reasonable person could have believed that the group really did violate the TOS, and the abuse reports were probably part of an organized campaign to get the group removed).

This strongly discourages users from organizing mob efforts against legitimate groups; if most of the jury ends up voting for the third choice, "This is an obviously legitimate group and the complaints were just an organized vigilante campaign", then the users who filed the complaints could have their own accounts penalized.

What I like about this algorithm is that the sizes and thresholds can be tweaked according to what you discover about the habits of the Facebook content reviewers. Suppose most volunteer reviewers turn out to be deadbeats who don't respond to "jury duty" when they're actually called upon to vote in an abuse report case. Fine — just increase the size of the jury, until the average number of users in a randomly convened jury who do respond, is large enough to be statistically significant. Or, suppose it turns out that people who sign up to review content to be deleted, are a more prudish bunch than average, and their votes tend to skew towards "delete it now!" in a way that is not representative of the general Facebook community. Fine — just raise the threshold for the percentage of "Yes" votes required to get content deleted. All that's required for the algorithm to work, is that content which clearly does violate the Terms of Service, gets more "Yes" votes on average than content that doesn't. Then make the jury size large enough that the voting results are statistically significant, so you can tell which side of the threshold you're on.

Another beneficial feature of the algorithm is that it's scaleable — there's no bottleneck of overworked reviewers at Facebook headquarters who have to review every decision. (They should probably review a random subset of the decisions to make sure the "juries" are getting what seems to be the right answer, but they don't have to check every one.) If Facebook doubles in size — and the amount of "abusive content" and the number of abuse reports doubles along with it — then as long as the pool of volunteers reviewers also doubles, each reviewer has no greater workload than they had before. But the workload of the abuse department at Facebook doesn't double.

Now, this algorithm ducks the question of how to handle "borderline" content. If a student creates a Facebook group called "MR. LANGAN IS A BUTT BRAIN," is that "harassment" or not? I would say no, but I'm not confident that a randomly selected pool of reviewers would agree. However, the point of this algorithm is to make sure that if content is posted on Facebook that almost nobody would reasonably agree is a violation of their Terms of Service, then a group of vigilantes can't get it removed by filing a torrent of abuse reports.

Also, this proposal can't do much about Facebook's Terms of Service being prudish to begin with. A Frenchman recently had his account suspended because he used a 19th-century oil painting of an artistic nude as his profile picture. Well, Facebook's TOS prohibits nudity -- not just sexual nudity, but all nudity, period. Even under my proposed algorithm, jurors would presumably have to be honest and vote that the painting did in fact violate Facebook's TOS, unless or until Facebook changes the rules. (For that matter, maybe this wasn't a case of prudishness anyway. I mean, we know it's "artistic" because it's more than 100 years old and it was painted in oils, right? Yeah, well check out the painting that the guy used as his profile picture. It presumably didn't help that the painting is so good that the Facebook censors probably thought it was a photograph.)

But notwithstanding these problems, this algorithm was the best trade-off I could come up with in terms of scalability and fairness. So here's the contest: Send me your best alternative, or best suggested improvement, or best fatal flaw in this proposal (even if you don't come up with something better, the discovery of a fatal flaw is still valuable) for a chance to win (a portion of) the $100 -- or, you can designate a charity to be the recipient of your winnings. Send your ideas to bennett at peacefire dot org and put "reporting" in the subject line. I reserve the right to split the prize between multiple winners, or to pay out more than the original $100 (or give winners the right to designate charitable donations totalling more than $100) if enough good points come in (or to pay out less than $100 if there's a real dearth of valid points, but there are enough brainiacs reading this that I think that's unlikely). In order for the contest not to detract from the discussion taking place in the comment threads, if more than one reader submits essentially the same idea, I'll give the credit to the first submitter -- so as you're sending me your idea, you can feel free to share it in the comment threads as well without worrying about someone re-submitting it and stealing a portion of your winnings. (If your submission is, "Bennett, your articles would be much shorter if you just state your conclusion, instead of also including a supporting argument and addressing possible objections", feel free to submit that just in the comment threads.)

In The Net Delusion, Morozov concludes his section on phony abuse reports by saying, "Good judgment, as it turns out, cannot be crowdsourced, if only because special interests always steer the process to suit their own objectives." I think he's right about the problems, but I disagree that they're unsolvable. I think my algorithm does in fact prevent "special interests" from "steering the process", but I'll pay to be convinced that I'm wrong. Today I'm just choosing the "winners" of the contest myself; maybe someday I'll crowdsource the decision by letting a randomly selected subset of users vote on the merits of each proposal... but I'm sure some of you are dying to tell me why that's a bad idea.

An anonymous reader writes "As New Zealand politicians are looking to rush through a new copyright law, 92A, which imposes a 'three strikes' regime on people accused of file sharing, some New Zealanders were a bit amused to see Parliament Member Melissa Lee stand up to speak in favor of the bill just hours after tweeting how she was enjoying a compilation of music put together for her by a friend. Does that count as her first strike?"

jrepin writes "Today, the European Court of Justice gave a preliminary opinion that will have far-reaching implications in the fight against overaggressive copyright monopoly abusers. It is not a final verdict, but the advocate general's position; the Court generally follows this. The Advocate Generals says that no ISP can be required to filter the Internet, and particularly not to enforce the copyright monopoly."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1sockchuck writes "Want to save money on data center cooling? Tip your racks on their side, fill them with mineral oil, and submerge your servers. Austin startup Green Revoluton Cooling first profiled here) has a video demo of its immersion cooling solution, which it says can handle racks using up to 100kW of power. A photo gallery on the company web site shows some early installations."

supersloshy writes "The team behind last December's successful Humble Indie Bundle 2 (as well as the original Bundle of course) have launched yet another bundle, but this time it's comprised entirely of games by developer Frozenbyte, including Trine, Shadowgrounds, Shadowgrounds: Survivor, a pre-order of Splot, and the prototype Jack Claw (with source code). All games (except Jack Claw) are, as always, available for Windows, Mac, and Linux-based operating systems and are DRM-free."

supersloshy writes "The team behind last December's successful Humble Indie Bundle 2 (as well as the original Bundle of course) have launched yet another bundle, but this time it's comprised entirely of games by developer Frozenbyte, including Trine, Shadowgrounds, Shadowgrounds: Survivor, a pre-order of Splot, and the prototype Jack Claw (with source code). All games (except Jack Claw) are, as always, available for Windows, Mac, and Linux-based operating systems and are DRM-free."

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game have put out a press release seeking to prohibit the use of electronic control devices for hunting. According to the release: "The department recognized the lack of authority to regulate the use of (Tasers) on wildlife and brought the concern to the Board of Game. Restricting the use of (Tasers) will reduce the risk of improper or unethical use on wildlife by the public or other agency personnel who are unfamiliar with the potential effects and hazards." This comes a few months after Taser announced a new wildlife management model.

RedEaredSlider writes "The hacker who settled with Sony after the company sued him for modifying his PlayStation 3 console is getting a lot of flak for not taking the fight further. 'Night Breed' [wrote], 'So basically you settled for a job and took people's money, giving them a false hope of settling for their rights? What do you plan to do with the money that was donated to you to provide a cushion for the legal battle? I hope you will be paying all those people back since you obviously didn't live up to your word.'"

RedEaredSlider writes "The hacker who settled with Sony after the company sued him for modifying his PlayStation 3 console is getting a lot of flak for not taking the fight further. 'Night Breed' [wrote], 'So basically you settled for a job and took people's money, giving them a false hope of settling for their rights? What do you plan to do with the money that was donated to you to provide a cushion for the legal battle? I hope you will be paying all those people back since you obviously didn't live up to your word.'"

recoiledsnake writes "Microsoft writes in a blog post that Google knowingly lied to the court while suing the US government over its consideration of only Microsoft implementations. We previously discussed Google winning an injunction against the Department of the Interior over this. According to Microsoft Deputy General Counsel David Howard, 'Google filed a motion for a preliminary injunction telling the court three times in a single document that Google Apps for Government is certified under FISMA. Google has repeated this statement in many other places as well. Indeed, for several months and as recently as this morning, Google's website states, "Google Apps for Government – now with FISMA certification." ... So imagine my surprise on Friday afternoon when, after some delay, some of the court papers were unsealed, at least in part. There for all to see was a statement by the Department of Justice contradicting Google on one of its basic FISMA claims.' Howard goes on to quote the DoJ brief (PDF), which says, '... it appears that Google's Google Apps for Government does not have FISMA certification.'"

recoiledsnake writes "Microsoft writes in a blog post that Google knowingly lied to the court while suing the US government over its consideration of only Microsoft implementations. We previously discussed Google winning an injunction against the Department of the Interior over this. According to Microsoft Deputy General Counsel David Howard, 'Google filed a motion for a preliminary injunction telling the court three times in a single document that Google Apps for Government is certified under FISMA. Google has repeated this statement in many other places as well. Indeed, for several months and as recently as this morning, Google's website states, "Google Apps for Government – now with FISMA certification." ... So imagine my surprise on Friday afternoon when, after some delay, some of the court papers were unsealed, at least in part. There for all to see was a statement by the Department of Justice contradicting Google on one of its basic FISMA claims.' Howard goes on to quote the DoJ brief (PDF), which says, '... it appears that Google's Google Apps for Government does not have FISMA certification.'"

matt_gaia writes "According to Sony Computer Entertainment America, they have reached a settlement with GeoHot (George Hotz), where Hotz has consented to a permanent injunction, but still denies any wrong-doing in the whole affair. Sony said, 'Our motivation for bringing this litigation was to protect our intellectual property and our consumers. We believe this settlement and the permanent injunction achieve this goal.'" I wonder if Anonymous will proceed with their anti-Sony campaign.

matt_gaia writes "According to Sony Computer Entertainment America, they have reached a settlement with GeoHot (George Hotz), where Hotz has consented to a permanent injunction, but still denies any wrong-doing in the whole affair. Sony said, 'Our motivation for bringing this litigation was to protect our intellectual property and our consumers. We believe this settlement and the permanent injunction achieve this goal.'" I wonder if Anonymous will proceed with their anti-Sony campaign.

akgraner writes "When I got up this morning, the news was all over Facebook and the free software news sites: Groklaw, the site that was influential in the SCO legal cases, will stop publication on May 16. It's news that I hear with decidedly mixed feelings."