Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader writes "Last month it was clear that French ISPs were not at all happy about the whole three strikes Hadopi process in France. Now that the 'notice' process has started, with Hadopi sending out notices to 10,000 people per day, it's hit a bit of a stumbling block. The French ISP named 'Free' has apparently figured out a bit of a loophole that allows it to not send out notices and protect its subscribers. Specifically, the law requires ISPs to reveal user info to Hadopi, but it does not require them to alert their users. But, the law does say that only users who are alerted by their ISP can be taken to court to be disconnected. In other words, even if Free is handing over user info, so long as it doesn't alert its users (which the law does not mandate), then those users cannot be kicked off the internet via Hadopi."

An anonymous reader writes "Last month it was clear that French ISPs were not at all happy about the whole three strikes Hadopi process in France. Now that the 'notice' process has started, with Hadopi sending out notices to 10,000 people per day, it's hit a bit of a stumbling block. The French ISP named 'Free' has apparently figured out a bit of a loophole that allows it to not send out notices and protect its subscribers. Specifically, the law requires ISPs to reveal user info to Hadopi, but it does not require them to alert their users. But, the law does say that only users who are alerted by their ISP can be taken to court to be disconnected. In other words, even if Free is handing over user info, so long as it doesn't alert its users (which the law does not mandate), then those users cannot be kicked off the internet via Hadopi."

An anonymous reader writes "Remember Righthaven? The copyright troll owned by the owner of the Las Vegas Review-Journal? You may remember, then, that Righthaven had sued Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle for posting LVRJ stories on her site. At the same time, LVRJ has been having its execs talk about how copyright infringement is no different than garden variety theft. So ... doesn't it seem a bit odd that the LVRJ is endorsing the very same candidate that it sued for such 'theft'?"

An anonymous reader writes "Remember Righthaven? The copyright troll owned by the owner of the Las Vegas Review-Journal? You may remember, then, that Righthaven had sued Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle for posting LVRJ stories on her site. At the same time, LVRJ has been having its execs talk about how copyright infringement is no different than garden variety theft. So ... doesn't it seem a bit odd that the LVRJ is endorsing the very same candidate that it sued for such 'theft'?"

eldavojohn writes "Facebook is rolling out some new changes (including groups) that are supposed to liberate user control. But something that might interest Slashdot readers even more is that they now allow you to download all your information from Facebook. That's everything — all your posts, pictures, videos, friend lists, etc. A video from David of the Open Source team at Facebook explains how it will work, although I don't see that option on my profile yet (they are slowly rolling it out). There's not a lot of details yet, but they at least require you to click a link from an e-mail and reenter your password to get this (to avoid spambots harvesting everyone's data and careless use of public computers resulting in data leaks). Perhaps competitors like Diaspora would be interested in using this base information to germinate user seeds?"

eldavojohn writes "A lot of Westerners view China as little more than the world's factory manufacturing anything with little regard to patents, copyrights and trademarks. But it seems as far as patents go, China is moving on up. According to the WIPO, the company that applied for the most patents in 2008 was not an American or Japanese company but China's Huawei Technologies. And China has made astonishing ground recently moving up to third place with 203,257 patent applications behind Japan (500,000) and the United States (390,000). It remains to be seen if these patents applications will come to fruition for China but it is evident that they are focusing on a new image as a leader in research and development. The Korean article concentrates on 2008 but you can find 2009 statistics at the WIPO's report on China along with some statistics breaking down applications by industry."

rheotaxis writes "Many professional web developers have spent years building dynamic, database-driven web applications, but some of us, like myself, want to make the user experience more interactive and instantaneous. The book Building the Realtime User Experience, by Ted Roden, is an introduction to some new techniques making that happen now. New web servers like Cometd and Tornado power solutions that keep HTTP connections open until data is available for the clients requesting it, a technique called 'long-polling.' This means web developers can provide a real-time user experience using HTTP for all sorts of client devices now connecting to the Internet, not just web browsers, but mobile devices as well." Read below for the rest of rheotaxis's review. Building the Realtime User Experience author Ted Roden pages 320 publisher O'Reilly Media rating 8/10 reviewer rheotaxis ISBN 0596806159 summary Shows you how to build realtime user experiences by adding features on your site without making big changes to the existing infrastructure This book covers SUP and PubSubHubbub syndication, messaging with Bayeux protocol and Cometd, and asynchronous Python using Tornado, contrasting these with well-known client-side JavaScript methods. It then demonstrates how long-polling can implement and integrate chat, IM, SMS, and analytics. The last chapter wraps up with an example using all these technologies, a multi-user, real-time, interactive game using geo-location with mobile clients. Ted's writing style is concise and to the point, focused exclusively on the challenges presented and solved in each chapter, including just enough details for experienced programmers to download and setup the software tools being used, including the Google App Engine. The code samples are straight-forward, but be forewarned, it will be easier for readers with some experience building server-side scripts like PHP, Python, or Java, and a database server like MySQL. On the other hand, even if you never used Google App Engine before, that's OK, because Ted covers that in enough detail to get you started quickly. The sample code wasn't yet available on the O'Reilly web site, so you'll need to type in the code samples to try them. Check the O'Reilly errata page for the book to get a head start making the code work. (Full disclosure: I posted some of the errata.) The sample code for Cometd and Tornado ran easily on my laptop (HP 2.2 GHz with Windows Vista), and should be fine on Linux or Mac. Everything you need is open-source and easily downloaded.

The author explains that real-time web development puts the user at the center of all web interactions, and that developers have struggled with solving the push versus pull problem. The pull method requires multiple, periodic queries for updates from server information feeds, something that wastes server CPU and bandwidth when no changes have occurred, and is compounded by the number of different users making these queries. The push method allows the servers to contact the clients when information feeds have been updated, saving CPU and bandwidth.

RSS was designed for easy syndication of information feeds, but it suffers from the limitations of the pull methodology. While several push technologies have been proposed to solve this problem, only Simple Update Protocol (SUP) and PubSubHubbub are covered in detail here. Both of these are demonstrated with PHP code, so they should be easy to implement on hosted web account with PHP and MySQL. The author explains that while SUP isn't a real push methodology, it does address some the CPU and bandwidth issues. PubSubHubbub, a true push methodology when compared to SUP, is described with an equal amount of detail.

Next, the book covers techniques already familiar to JavaScript programmers who have experience building AJAX enabled web pages. Skim the text and glance at the code and diagrams in Chapter 3, if you already have this experience. The subtitle for this chapter is "Widgets in Pseudorealtime", and the key take away from this chapter is that client-side JavaScript can be used with pull or push technologies, depending upon the server-side implementation. If you don't yet have experience with AJAX, then be sure you can follow these code examples, because AJAX will be used in all the other chapters.

Have you ever wished your blog could send live updates to your readers the moment you post them? You'll learn how, using Bayeux protocol, Java, Cometd, and the Jetty web server. The sample code allows you to grasp how long-polling works with modern browsers. Once a client browser opens an HTTP connection to a web server using a POST method, the server leaves this connection open until it has data to deliver to the client. This chapter suggests using Firebug, a Firefox plugin for debugging web applications from the client side, to discover and track long-polling seasons.

Do you need to handle a large amount of incoming data, and then redisplay it on client browsers with almost no delay? Tornado, the Python web server, provides a solution. Tornado was created by FriendFeed, and made open source after being acquired by Facebook. Kudos to Facebook for making Tornado available. Please read Chapter 5 and 6 together, since they both explain how the Tornado server works. The sample code starts with Python threads that cache a Twitter feed, process and filter it, then send it out to web browsers already connected to Tornado using long-polling and asynchronous callbacks. Tornado is then used to implement a peer to peer chat system using long-polling. Again, each client stays connected to the Tornado server until messages are ready to deliver to each chat participant. Taken together, Chapter 5 and 6 lay the groundwork for more advanced Tornado web applications covered later in the book.

This is followed by two chapters using the Google App Engine to support real-time user experiences even though the Google App Engine does not support long-polling. If you have never used Google App Engine before this, don't worry. The author spends 10 pages explaining how to sign up. Then you build an application in the cloud and connect with your IM client, instead of the web browser. You can make your IM server accept commands and respond with information from other web services. The section, "Setting Up an API", gives you a tantalizing glimpse of possibilities explored later in the book. After adding Python code from the next chapter, you have SMS capabilities. Why would you want to do this? Because it allows users to keep informed while they're away from the web, making SMS another part of the real-time user experience.

Once you have implemented and deployed your real-time application, you can add analytics that give you immediate feedback about user interactions with your site. Instead of paying for a service, you can build your own custom web analytics using Tornado and client-side JavaScript. I especially like the authors approach to summarizing all the incoming web usage data into a single, super-simple, HTML template that is immediately updated as web usage changes. It should satisfy your curiosity to watch users interact with your web site in real-time, and you can make it track IM and SMS traffic connecting to your server too. Finally, the last chapter demonstrates how all the know-how you learn from the rest of the book can be combined in new and highly imaginative ways. The author provides all the details you need to setup a location-based, multi-user, real-time, interactive, game played by users with mobile web devices.

This book would be good for anyone that needs to quickly learn how to use Tornado and integrate it with other web services. It's also helpful for people who want to integrate the Google App Engine with other web services. Whether you're going to build a real-time web experience from the ground up, or just add a few more dynamic features to an existing site, the lessons you can learn from this book will help you.

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

rheotaxis writes "Many professional web developers have spent years building dynamic, database-driven web applications, but some of us, like myself, want to make the user experience more interactive and instantaneous. The book Building the Realtime User Experience, by Ted Roden, is an introduction to some new techniques making that happen now. New web servers like Cometd and Tornado power solutions that keep HTTP connections open until data is available for the clients requesting it, a technique called 'long-polling.' This means web developers can provide a real-time user experience using HTTP for all sorts of client devices now connecting to the Internet, not just web browsers, but mobile devices as well." Read below for the rest of rheotaxis's review. Building the Realtime User Experience author Ted Roden pages 320 publisher O'Reilly Media rating 8/10 reviewer rheotaxis ISBN 0596806159 summary Shows you how to build realtime user experiences by adding features on your site without making big changes to the existing infrastructure This book covers SUP and PubSubHubbub syndication, messaging with Bayeux protocol and Cometd, and asynchronous Python using Tornado, contrasting these with well-known client-side JavaScript methods. It then demonstrates how long-polling can implement and integrate chat, IM, SMS, and analytics. The last chapter wraps up with an example using all these technologies, a multi-user, real-time, interactive game using geo-location with mobile clients. Ted's writing style is concise and to the point, focused exclusively on the challenges presented and solved in each chapter, including just enough details for experienced programmers to download and setup the software tools being used, including the Google App Engine. The code samples are straight-forward, but be forewarned, it will be easier for readers with some experience building server-side scripts like PHP, Python, or Java, and a database server like MySQL. On the other hand, even if you never used Google App Engine before, that's OK, because Ted covers that in enough detail to get you started quickly. The sample code wasn't yet available on the O'Reilly web site, so you'll need to type in the code samples to try them. Check the O'Reilly errata page for the book to get a head start making the code work. (Full disclosure: I posted some of the errata.) The sample code for Cometd and Tornado ran easily on my laptop (HP 2.2 GHz with Windows Vista), and should be fine on Linux or Mac. Everything you need is open-source and easily downloaded.

The author explains that real-time web development puts the user at the center of all web interactions, and that developers have struggled with solving the push versus pull problem. The pull method requires multiple, periodic queries for updates from server information feeds, something that wastes server CPU and bandwidth when no changes have occurred, and is compounded by the number of different users making these queries. The push method allows the servers to contact the clients when information feeds have been updated, saving CPU and bandwidth.

RSS was designed for easy syndication of information feeds, but it suffers from the limitations of the pull methodology. While several push technologies have been proposed to solve this problem, only Simple Update Protocol (SUP) and PubSubHubbub are covered in detail here. Both of these are demonstrated with PHP code, so they should be easy to implement on hosted web account with PHP and MySQL. The author explains that while SUP isn't a real push methodology, it does address some the CPU and bandwidth issues. PubSubHubbub, a true push methodology when compared to SUP, is described with an equal amount of detail.

Next, the book covers techniques already familiar to JavaScript programmers who have experience building AJAX enabled web pages. Skim the text and glance at the code and diagrams in Chapter 3, if you already have this experience. The subtitle for this chapter is "Widgets in Pseudorealtime", and the key take away from this chapter is that client-side JavaScript can be used with pull or push technologies, depending upon the server-side implementation. If you don't yet have experience with AJAX, then be sure you can follow these code examples, because AJAX will be used in all the other chapters.

Have you ever wished your blog could send live updates to your readers the moment you post them? You'll learn how, using Bayeux protocol, Java, Cometd, and the Jetty web server. The sample code allows you to grasp how long-polling works with modern browsers. Once a client browser opens an HTTP connection to a web server using a POST method, the server leaves this connection open until it has data to deliver to the client. This chapter suggests using Firebug, a Firefox plugin for debugging web applications from the client side, to discover and track long-polling seasons.

Do you need to handle a large amount of incoming data, and then redisplay it on client browsers with almost no delay? Tornado, the Python web server, provides a solution. Tornado was created by FriendFeed, and made open source after being acquired by Facebook. Kudos to Facebook for making Tornado available. Please read Chapter 5 and 6 together, since they both explain how the Tornado server works. The sample code starts with Python threads that cache a Twitter feed, process and filter it, then send it out to web browsers already connected to Tornado using long-polling and asynchronous callbacks. Tornado is then used to implement a peer to peer chat system using long-polling. Again, each client stays connected to the Tornado server until messages are ready to deliver to each chat participant. Taken together, Chapter 5 and 6 lay the groundwork for more advanced Tornado web applications covered later in the book.

This is followed by two chapters using the Google App Engine to support real-time user experiences even though the Google App Engine does not support long-polling. If you have never used Google App Engine before this, don't worry. The author spends 10 pages explaining how to sign up. Then you build an application in the cloud and connect with your IM client, instead of the web browser. You can make your IM server accept commands and respond with information from other web services. The section, "Setting Up an API", gives you a tantalizing glimpse of possibilities explored later in the book. After adding Python code from the next chapter, you have SMS capabilities. Why would you want to do this? Because it allows users to keep informed while they're away from the web, making SMS another part of the real-time user experience.

Once you have implemented and deployed your real-time application, you can add analytics that give you immediate feedback about user interactions with your site. Instead of paying for a service, you can build your own custom web analytics using Tornado and client-side JavaScript. I especially like the authors approach to summarizing all the incoming web usage data into a single, super-simple, HTML template that is immediately updated as web usage changes. It should satisfy your curiosity to watch users interact with your web site in real-time, and you can make it track IM and SMS traffic connecting to your server too. Finally, the last chapter demonstrates how all the know-how you learn from the rest of the book can be combined in new and highly imaginative ways. The author provides all the details you need to setup a location-based, multi-user, real-time, interactive, game played by users with mobile web devices.

This book would be good for anyone that needs to quickly learn how to use Tornado and integrate it with other web services. It's also helpful for people who want to integrate the Google App Engine with other web services. Whether you're going to build a real-time web experience from the ground up, or just add a few more dynamic features to an existing site, the lessons you can learn from this book will help you.

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

bugsbunnyak writes "The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded for the discovery of graphene to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov. Graphene is a novel one-atom-thick lattice state of carbon which has demonstrated unique quantum mechanical properties. These properties derive in part from the 2-dimensional nature of the material: quantum interactions are constrained to the effectively planar dimension of the lattice. Graphene holds promise for physical applications including touch screens, light cells, and potentially solar panels. Geim becomes the first scientist to achieve a Nobel prize despite earlier winning the highly-coveted Ig Nobel in 2000 for his studies of diamagnetic levitation — also known as The Flying Frog." Slashdot originally mentioned the frog almost exactly 10 years ago.

Black Gold Alchemist writes "Dowa, a Japanese mining company in Kosaka, has begun the recycling of rare earth metals from used cellphones and computers. This is in response to a recent, temporary trade embargo from China, which is the leading supplier of rare earth metals needed for production of products including hybrid cars, wind turbines, and LCD screens. Because of the shortage of rare earth metals, Japanese trade minister Akihiro Ohata is asking the government to include a rare earth strategy in its supplementary budget for this year."

An anonymous reader writes "After taking the stage at the Apple iPhone event in September, game developer Epic Games has finally revealed more about its plan to release Unreal Engine for the iOS devices. UE3 is incredibly popular on consoles, and its free UDK has been really great for us modders. In this new interview, engine boss Mark Rein says the developer envisions a future where all game devices are handhelds, with high-end processors inside: 'It feels like there's a great opportunity for game consoles to cease to be something you plug into the wall and rather become something you take with you. Of course it will be more than just your game console; you can have your productivity apps, your documents, and your media collections on it as well.'"

myocardialinfarction writes "In the wake of widespread criticism of ACS:Law and its business model, British Telecom has asked for a moratorium on sharing customer's data in cases of alleged illegal file sharing. 'BT lawyers asked for the adjournment, saying that the firm needed to see details of the security system that would be used to store its customers' data before it could comply with any order. ... "We want to ensure broadband subscribers are adequately protected so that rights holders can pursue their claims for copyright infringement without causing unnecessary worry to innocent people."'"

darthcamaro writes "Red Hat has settled another patent case with patent holding firm Acacia. This time the patent is US Patent #6,163,776, 'System and method for exchanging data and commands between an object oriented system and relational system.' While it's great that Red Hat has ended this particular patent threat, it's not yet clear how they've settled this case. The last time Red Hat tangled with Acacia they won in an Texas jury trial. 'Red Hat routinely addresses attempts to impede the innovative forces of open source via allegations of patent infringement,' Red Hat said in a statement. 'We can confirm that Red Hat, Inc and Software Tree LLC have settled patent litigation that was pending in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas.'"

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from The Atlantic: "'The average American doesn't realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists' to protect incumbent interests, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Atlantic editor James Bennet at the Washington Ideas Forum. 'It's shocking how the system actually works.' In a wide-ranging interview that spanned human nature, the future of machines, and how Google could have helped the stimulus, Schmidt said technology could 'completely change the way government works.' 'Washington is an incumbent protection machine,' Schmidt said. 'Technology is fundamentally disruptive.' Mobile phones and personal technology, for example, could be used to record the bills that members of Congress actually read and then determine what stimulus funds were successfully spent." We discussed a specific example of this from the cable industry back in August.

Andorin writes "The US law firm of Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver, otherwise known as the US Copyright Group, filed suit at the end of August against another 2,177 individuals for allegedly downloading and sharing the slasher film Cornered! (In total the USCG has now filed suit against over 16,200 individuals.) In retaliation, Operation Payback, the Anonymous-led project responsible for DDoSing websites of the RIAA and MPAA, targeted the US Copyright Group's website with a DDoS, temporarily bringing it down for a few hours. The group behind the attacks say they'll continue 'until they stop being angry.' Additionally, the local police department evacuated the office of Dunlap, Grubb, & Weaver after a bomb threat was emailed to the firm. The building was searched, but no bomb was found."

msmoriarty writes "Looks like Microsoft has gained some unlikely allies in its ongoing (and losing) i4i XML patent dispute: the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Apache Software Foundation. The reason? Microsoft has decided the strategy for its Supreme Court appeal will be to argue that the standards of proof in patent cases are too high — this from a company that has thousands of patents it regularly defends. The EFF explains in a blog post why it decided to file the 'friend of the court' brief on Microsoft's side."

An anonymous reader writes "It looks like iPhone users are not immune to the types of data leaks recently discovered on the Android platform. Researchers looked at the top free applications available from the App Store and discovered that '68% of these applications were transmitting UDIDs to servers under the application vendor's control each time the application is launched.' The iPhone's Unique Device ID, or UDID, cannot be changed, nor can its transmission be disabled by the user. The full paper is available in PDF form."

eldavojohn writes "Linux Kernel Development Third Edition by Robert Love is the perfect book for the beginning or intermediate Linux kernel hacker. It provided me an excellent bridge between the high level introduction I had in college (from Operating Systems Concepts) and the actual kernel code. The best part about this book is that the chapters are — like the kernel — modular, and allow the reader to dig down in a particular part if they have a specific interest. This, in conjunction with Love's indications of which files and code snippets contain the logic, gave me confidence to clone the kernel, make tiny adjustments, compile and run. At four hundred pages, the book is a long read, but for kernel newbies like me it's a better alternative to jumping into the millions of lines of code. While you might find this information in pieces floating around online, this book balances clarity with brevity in an exceptional manner. It should also be noted that this book defaults to the x86 architecture when explaining architecture-sensitive parts of the kernel (with 64-bit differences occasionally outlined)." Keep reading for the rest of eldavojohn's review. Linux Kernel Development Third Edition author Robert Love pages 480 publisher Addison-Wesley Professional rating 10 reviewer eldavojohn ISBN 978-0-672-32946-3 summary A thorough guide to the design and implementation of the 2.6 Linux kernel tailored for developers. If you're unfamiliar with Robert Love, let's just say he's been active in contributing to the Linux kernel for fifteen years and he's currently at Google and was part of the Android team. This is his third edition of Linux Kernel Development, and it's tailored to the 2.6 kernel. The first chapter of this book gives you a very brief history of Linux along with an explanation that a major upgrade has been postponed and 2.6 is a very stable and capable version to use. I'd imagine many companies today (like my own) live and die by the capabilities of 2.6 hosting a variety of services. The second chapter sets you up with git to clone the code and deploy it locally without hosing your kernel. If you'd like to sample Love's writing style, these two chapters are available for preview online (PDF).

From there on out, Love divides the kernel up and proceeds to ease the reader into each realm that he covers. You won't get full coverage of the kernel but he delivers the most important chunks that he can in 400 pages and makes good on keeping the material in focus. Every chapter seems to follow a pattern of a few pages of generic remedial kernel design talk then a few pages of Linux specific historical approaches to said design followed by the meat and potatoes in 10 to 40 pages depending on how much code is cited. A short paragraph or two tidies up each chapter to segue into the next one. I failed to find any weaknesses in Love's writing. While he struggles to keep the reader engaged and entertained at times, there's simply too much explaining to be done for him to waste pages on wit and banter. If any of that is to be found, it's sprinkled around the intros and outros surrounding some genuinely solid technical writing. To keep this review relatively concise, I'll only fully cover the content in the first half of the book.

Chapters three and four focus on processes and how the kernel manages them. Love glosses over some basic concepts (i.e. the state transition diagram of a process) about process creation but also includes small code snippets ranging from function signatures to iterative algorithms that do the heavy lifting when initializing and maintaining processes and their hierarchical structures. If you've ever wondered exactly what happens during a fork or how zombie processes are managed, it's all answered here in English. The book moves on to Linux's relatively new completely fair scheduler (CFS) and also describes how to switch out schedulers (the older schedulers appear to remain unused in the code if you want to swap them back in). Love concentrates on kernel/sched.c and kernel/sched_fair.c as he explains the code and flags that control waking, sleeping, preemption and context switching. For me this was one of the most interesting parts of the book where the reader gets to see timeslice and 'nice' factors at work in the actual code. The runnable processes are managed in a red-black tree and Love takes care to show how these are cached and used in the code. As I read these chapters, I couldn't help but wonder how companies like Google tailor the Linux kernel to their needs inside their massive server farms — the care to 'waste not' is already so evident in Love's explanations that tweaking through settings and flags or even rewriting seems like a hard route to save cycles.

Chapter five is a brief how-to about system calls in Linux. This chapter details how to create a system call and how to register it, but also gives background on how the kernel handles system calls and explains concisely how Linux handles system calls in regards to security and stability. Most importantly this chapter explains why you should rarely — if ever — resort to system calls (if it's not accepted as part of the kernel, you face future conflicts with the syscall number).

Chapter six was a bit of a surprise to me but outlines in depth four data structures (linked lists, queues, maps and red black trees). If you code only for Linux and you are rolling your own of any of these data structures then this chapter is for you. It's a bit of a flashback for me but important to note so that one does not duplicate these efforts inside the already expansive code in the kernel. Indeed, this topic is an addition to the book that was not present in the second edition.

Chapter seven is a good illustration of Love's ability to ease the reader into the kernel. He starts off giving a high level introduction to hardware interrupts and their superiority to hardware polling. Form there he explains interrupt handlers and finally the top half (handler) versus the bottom half (deferred workload). This four page intro to the chapter helps beginners like myself prepare for the coming sections on writing a hardware interrupt handler, registering it, unregistering it, disabling all or some handlers, explaining /proc/interrupts and checking contexts. This chapter lays the foundation for following chapters and shows the basics of interrupt handlers. Chapter eight, of course, covers exactly what was left unexplained in the prior chapter — the bottom half. And again the chapter eases into it with an explanation detailing bottom halves. Love gives just the right amount of background (a few paragraphs) to help the reader understand why we are about to discuss softirqs (statically defined bottom halves), tasklets (dynamically defined bottom halves built on top of softirqs) and work queues at great length.

Chapters nine and ten begin with topics the reader might already have some familiarity with: race conditions. Nine begins with the standard topic of the kinds of problems race conditions pose and how one can handle them. The reason for this is the advent of symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) support that has faced increasing demand in modern operating systems. Love covers what questions the reader should be asking themselves when writing code that may be adversely affected by more than one processor. Love warns the reader that this is not something that can be tacked on at the tail end of development; it must be in the developer's mind from the start. This leads nicely into chapter ten which recalls these problems and explains the many different ways they can be addressed inside the Linux kernel. For each of these approaches, Love outlines the C functions that are available with a brief description. Love lists them in increasing complexity and decreasing frequency: atomic operations, spin locks, semaphores, mutex, completion variables, sequential locks and the Big Kernel Lock (BKL). For each of these, Love provides bullets of guidelines on when to use them versus the others. The most useful of the tables int his chapter are those that contain requirement/recommended tables that help prescribe the reader a solution. But Love advises that the simplest mechanism should be employed unless more complexity is demanded. He also advises the reader to try out several options before settling on the best way to enforce synchronization and handle concurrency. Aside from the specific technical details, this chapter was full of useful rules and guidelines to keep in mind.

The rest of the book covers — in equally excellent detail — the topics of: timers and their management, memory management, VFS, address space, I/O, page caching, debugging and portability. Love also gives some short pointers on code style, creating patches and how to join the community in the final chapter. Skimming the ToC from the second edition (also on 2.6) reveals no major changes to topics aside from some reordering and updating of sample code (like the completely fair scheduler). It's clear that Love has set out to provide a comprehensive guide to the Linux kernel and if you are looking to work intimately with the kernel for fun or for profit then this is the definitive book for delving below the surface of Linux.

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

eldavojohn writes "Linux Kernel Development Third Edition by Robert Love is the perfect book for the beginning or intermediate Linux kernel hacker. It provided me an excellent bridge between the high level introduction I had in college (from Operating Systems Concepts) and the actual kernel code. The best part about this book is that the chapters are — like the kernel — modular, and allow the reader to dig down in a particular part if they have a specific interest. This, in conjunction with Love's indications of which files and code snippets contain the logic, gave me confidence to clone the kernel, make tiny adjustments, compile and run. At four hundred pages, the book is a long read, but for kernel newbies like me it's a better alternative to jumping into the millions of lines of code. While you might find this information in pieces floating around online, this book balances clarity with brevity in an exceptional manner. It should also be noted that this book defaults to the x86 architecture when explaining architecture-sensitive parts of the kernel (with 64-bit differences occasionally outlined)." Keep reading for the rest of eldavojohn's review. Linux Kernel Development Third Edition author Robert Love pages 480 publisher Addison-Wesley Professional rating 10 reviewer eldavojohn ISBN 978-0-672-32946-3 summary A thorough guide to the design and implementation of the 2.6 Linux kernel tailored for developers. If you're unfamiliar with Robert Love, let's just say he's been active in contributing to the Linux kernel for fifteen years and he's currently at Google and was part of the Android team. This is his third edition of Linux Kernel Development, and it's tailored to the 2.6 kernel. The first chapter of this book gives you a very brief history of Linux along with an explanation that a major upgrade has been postponed and 2.6 is a very stable and capable version to use. I'd imagine many companies today (like my own) live and die by the capabilities of 2.6 hosting a variety of services. The second chapter sets you up with git to clone the code and deploy it locally without hosing your kernel. If you'd like to sample Love's writing style, these two chapters are available for preview online (PDF).

From there on out, Love divides the kernel up and proceeds to ease the reader into each realm that he covers. You won't get full coverage of the kernel but he delivers the most important chunks that he can in 400 pages and makes good on keeping the material in focus. Every chapter seems to follow a pattern of a few pages of generic remedial kernel design talk then a few pages of Linux specific historical approaches to said design followed by the meat and potatoes in 10 to 40 pages depending on how much code is cited. A short paragraph or two tidies up each chapter to segue into the next one. I failed to find any weaknesses in Love's writing. While he struggles to keep the reader engaged and entertained at times, there's simply too much explaining to be done for him to waste pages on wit and banter. If any of that is to be found, it's sprinkled around the intros and outros surrounding some genuinely solid technical writing. To keep this review relatively concise, I'll only fully cover the content in the first half of the book.

Chapters three and four focus on processes and how the kernel manages them. Love glosses over some basic concepts (i.e. the state transition diagram of a process) about process creation but also includes small code snippets ranging from function signatures to iterative algorithms that do the heavy lifting when initializing and maintaining processes and their hierarchical structures. If you've ever wondered exactly what happens during a fork or how zombie processes are managed, it's all answered here in English. The book moves on to Linux's relatively new completely fair scheduler (CFS) and also describes how to switch out schedulers (the older schedulers appear to remain unused in the code if you want to swap them back in). Love concentrates on kernel/sched.c and kernel/sched_fair.c as he explains the code and flags that control waking, sleeping, preemption and context switching. For me this was one of the most interesting parts of the book where the reader gets to see timeslice and 'nice' factors at work in the actual code. The runnable processes are managed in a red-black tree and Love takes care to show how these are cached and used in the code. As I read these chapters, I couldn't help but wonder how companies like Google tailor the Linux kernel to their needs inside their massive server farms — the care to 'waste not' is already so evident in Love's explanations that tweaking through settings and flags or even rewriting seems like a hard route to save cycles.

Chapter five is a brief how-to about system calls in Linux. This chapter details how to create a system call and how to register it, but also gives background on how the kernel handles system calls and explains concisely how Linux handles system calls in regards to security and stability. Most importantly this chapter explains why you should rarely — if ever — resort to system calls (if it's not accepted as part of the kernel, you face future conflicts with the syscall number).

Chapter six was a bit of a surprise to me but outlines in depth four data structures (linked lists, queues, maps and red black trees). If you code only for Linux and you are rolling your own of any of these data structures then this chapter is for you. It's a bit of a flashback for me but important to note so that one does not duplicate these efforts inside the already expansive code in the kernel. Indeed, this topic is an addition to the book that was not present in the second edition.

Chapter seven is a good illustration of Love's ability to ease the reader into the kernel. He starts off giving a high level introduction to hardware interrupts and their superiority to hardware polling. Form there he explains interrupt handlers and finally the top half (handler) versus the bottom half (deferred workload). This four page intro to the chapter helps beginners like myself prepare for the coming sections on writing a hardware interrupt handler, registering it, unregistering it, disabling all or some handlers, explaining /proc/interrupts and checking contexts. This chapter lays the foundation for following chapters and shows the basics of interrupt handlers. Chapter eight, of course, covers exactly what was left unexplained in the prior chapter — the bottom half. And again the chapter eases into it with an explanation detailing bottom halves. Love gives just the right amount of background (a few paragraphs) to help the reader understand why we are about to discuss softirqs (statically defined bottom halves), tasklets (dynamically defined bottom halves built on top of softirqs) and work queues at great length.

Chapters nine and ten begin with topics the reader might already have some familiarity with: race conditions. Nine begins with the standard topic of the kinds of problems race conditions pose and how one can handle them. The reason for this is the advent of symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) support that has faced increasing demand in modern operating systems. Love covers what questions the reader should be asking themselves when writing code that may be adversely affected by more than one processor. Love warns the reader that this is not something that can be tacked on at the tail end of development; it must be in the developer's mind from the start. This leads nicely into chapter ten which recalls these problems and explains the many different ways they can be addressed inside the Linux kernel. For each of these approaches, Love outlines the C functions that are available with a brief description. Love lists them in increasing complexity and decreasing frequency: atomic operations, spin locks, semaphores, mutex, completion variables, sequential locks and the Big Kernel Lock (BKL). For each of these, Love provides bullets of guidelines on when to use them versus the others. The most useful of the tables int his chapter are those that contain requirement/recommended tables that help prescribe the reader a solution. But Love advises that the simplest mechanism should be employed unless more complexity is demanded. He also advises the reader to try out several options before settling on the best way to enforce synchronization and handle concurrency. Aside from the specific technical details, this chapter was full of useful rules and guidelines to keep in mind.

The rest of the book covers — in equally excellent detail — the topics of: timers and their management, memory management, VFS, address space, I/O, page caching, debugging and portability. Love also gives some short pointers on code style, creating patches and how to join the community in the final chapter. Skimming the ToC from the second edition (also on 2.6) reveals no major changes to topics aside from some reordering and updating of sample code (like the completely fair scheduler). It's clear that Love has set out to provide a comprehensive guide to the Linux kernel and if you are looking to work intimately with the kernel for fun or for profit then this is the definitive book for delving below the surface of Linux.

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

eldavojohn writes "Linux Kernel Development Third Edition by Robert Love is the perfect book for the beginning or intermediate Linux kernel hacker. It provided me an excellent bridge between the high level introduction I had in college (from Operating Systems Concepts) and the actual kernel code. The best part about this book is that the chapters are — like the kernel — modular, and allow the reader to dig down in a particular part if they have a specific interest. This, in conjunction with Love's indications of which files and code snippets contain the logic, gave me confidence to clone the kernel, make tiny adjustments, compile and run. At four hundred pages, the book is a long read, but for kernel newbies like me it's a better alternative to jumping into the millions of lines of code. While you might find this information in pieces floating around online, this book balances clarity with brevity in an exceptional manner. It should also be noted that this book defaults to the x86 architecture when explaining architecture-sensitive parts of the kernel (with 64-bit differences occasionally outlined)." Keep reading for the rest of eldavojohn's review. Linux Kernel Development Third Edition author Robert Love pages 480 publisher Addison-Wesley Professional rating 10 reviewer eldavojohn ISBN 978-0-672-32946-3 summary A thorough guide to the design and implementation of the 2.6 Linux kernel tailored for developers. If you're unfamiliar with Robert Love, let's just say he's been active in contributing to the Linux kernel for fifteen years and he's currently at Google and was part of the Android team. This is his third edition of Linux Kernel Development, and it's tailored to the 2.6 kernel. The first chapter of this book gives you a very brief history of Linux along with an explanation that a major upgrade has been postponed and 2.6 is a very stable and capable version to use. I'd imagine many companies today (like my own) live and die by the capabilities of 2.6 hosting a variety of services. The second chapter sets you up with git to clone the code and deploy it locally without hosing your kernel. If you'd like to sample Love's writing style, these two chapters are available for preview online (PDF).

From there on out, Love divides the kernel up and proceeds to ease the reader into each realm that he covers. You won't get full coverage of the kernel but he delivers the most important chunks that he can in 400 pages and makes good on keeping the material in focus. Every chapter seems to follow a pattern of a few pages of generic remedial kernel design talk then a few pages of Linux specific historical approaches to said design followed by the meat and potatoes in 10 to 40 pages depending on how much code is cited. A short paragraph or two tidies up each chapter to segue into the next one. I failed to find any weaknesses in Love's writing. While he struggles to keep the reader engaged and entertained at times, there's simply too much explaining to be done for him to waste pages on wit and banter. If any of that is to be found, it's sprinkled around the intros and outros surrounding some genuinely solid technical writing. To keep this review relatively concise, I'll only fully cover the content in the first half of the book.

Chapters three and four focus on processes and how the kernel manages them. Love glosses over some basic concepts (i.e. the state transition diagram of a process) about process creation but also includes small code snippets ranging from function signatures to iterative algorithms that do the heavy lifting when initializing and maintaining processes and their hierarchical structures. If you've ever wondered exactly what happens during a fork or how zombie processes are managed, it's all answered here in English. The book moves on to Linux's relatively new completely fair scheduler (CFS) and also describes how to switch out schedulers (the older schedulers appear to remain unused in the code if you want to swap them back in). Love concentrates on kernel/sched.c and kernel/sched_fair.c as he explains the code and flags that control waking, sleeping, preemption and context switching. For me this was one of the most interesting parts of the book where the reader gets to see timeslice and 'nice' factors at work in the actual code. The runnable processes are managed in a red-black tree and Love takes care to show how these are cached and used in the code. As I read these chapters, I couldn't help but wonder how companies like Google tailor the Linux kernel to their needs inside their massive server farms — the care to 'waste not' is already so evident in Love's explanations that tweaking through settings and flags or even rewriting seems like a hard route to save cycles.

Chapter five is a brief how-to about system calls in Linux. This chapter details how to create a system call and how to register it, but also gives background on how the kernel handles system calls and explains concisely how Linux handles system calls in regards to security and stability. Most importantly this chapter explains why you should rarely — if ever — resort to system calls (if it's not accepted as part of the kernel, you face future conflicts with the syscall number).

Chapter six was a bit of a surprise to me but outlines in depth four data structures (linked lists, queues, maps and red black trees). If you code only for Linux and you are rolling your own of any of these data structures then this chapter is for you. It's a bit of a flashback for me but important to note so that one does not duplicate these efforts inside the already expansive code in the kernel. Indeed, this topic is an addition to the book that was not present in the second edition.

Chapter seven is a good illustration of Love's ability to ease the reader into the kernel. He starts off giving a high level introduction to hardware interrupts and their superiority to hardware polling. Form there he explains interrupt handlers and finally the top half (handler) versus the bottom half (deferred workload). This four page intro to the chapter helps beginners like myself prepare for the coming sections on writing a hardware interrupt handler, registering it, unregistering it, disabling all or some handlers, explaining /proc/interrupts and checking contexts. This chapter lays the foundation for following chapters and shows the basics of interrupt handlers. Chapter eight, of course, covers exactly what was left unexplained in the prior chapter — the bottom half. And again the chapter eases into it with an explanation detailing bottom halves. Love gives just the right amount of background (a few paragraphs) to help the reader understand why we are about to discuss softirqs (statically defined bottom halves), tasklets (dynamically defined bottom halves built on top of softirqs) and work queues at great length.

Chapters nine and ten begin with topics the reader might already have some familiarity with: race conditions. Nine begins with the standard topic of the kinds of problems race conditions pose and how one can handle them. The reason for this is the advent of symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) support that has faced increasing demand in modern operating systems. Love covers what questions the reader should be asking themselves when writing code that may be adversely affected by more than one processor. Love warns the reader that this is not something that can be tacked on at the tail end of development; it must be in the developer's mind from the start. This leads nicely into chapter ten which recalls these problems and explains the many different ways they can be addressed inside the Linux kernel. For each of these approaches, Love outlines the C functions that are available with a brief description. Love lists them in increasing complexity and decreasing frequency: atomic operations, spin locks, semaphores, mutex, completion variables, sequential locks and the Big Kernel Lock (BKL). For each of these, Love provides bullets of guidelines on when to use them versus the others. The most useful of the tables int his chapter are those that contain requirement/recommended tables that help prescribe the reader a solution. But Love advises that the simplest mechanism should be employed unless more complexity is demanded. He also advises the reader to try out several options before settling on the best way to enforce synchronization and handle concurrency. Aside from the specific technical details, this chapter was full of useful rules and guidelines to keep in mind.

The rest of the book covers — in equally excellent detail — the topics of: timers and their management, memory management, VFS, address space, I/O, page caching, debugging and portability. Love also gives some short pointers on code style, creating patches and how to join the community in the final chapter. Skimming the ToC from the second edition (also on 2.6) reveals no major changes to topics aside from some reordering and updating of sample code (like the completely fair scheduler). It's clear that Love has set out to provide a comprehensive guide to the Linux kernel and if you are looking to work intimately with the kernel for fun or for profit then this is the definitive book for delving below the surface of Linux.

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

Last month we discussed news that upcoming shooter Medal of Honor would allow players to take the role of Taliban forces in multiplayer games, causing no small amount of consternation among political groups and military supporters. Now, Electronic Arts and developer Danger Close have bowed to pressure and announced that the Taliban side would simply be referred to as "opposing force." Quoting executive producer Greg Goodrich: "The majority of this feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. For this, the Medal of Honor team is deeply appreciative. However, we have also received feedback from friends and families of fallen soldiers who have expressed concern over the inclusion of the Taliban in the multiplayer portion of our game. This is a very important voice to the Medal of Honor team. This is a voice that has earned the right to be listened to. It is a voice that we care deeply about. ... While this change should not directly affect gamers, as it does not fundamentally alter the gameplay, we are making this change for the men and women serving in the military and for the families of those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice — this franchise will never willfully disrespect, intentionally or otherwise, your memory and service."

tacarat writes "The last time Blizzard mentioned their new Real ID system, there was a strong backlash from users over privacy issues. Blizzard reconsidered their plans to require real names for forums, and little has been heard about it since. Now, they've announced new privacy settings, allowing users to limit how their name gets shared or to disable the system entirely. Quoting: 'These options provide Real ID users with additional tools for customizing the service based on their preferences, enabling the ability to opt in or out of the Real ID "Friends of Friends" and "Add Facebook Friends" features or to turn off Real ID altogether.'"

gatorfan sends word that Xmarks, which announced its upcoming closure a few days back, may not be so dead after all. The outcry from people willing to pay for the service was so loud that the company has now posted a pledge that users can sign if they are willing to pay for the service, and they say that they have fielded inquiries from several organizations who might be willing to buy the company's assets and keep the service going.

Following on the 19 ZeuS botnet arrests in the UK, adeelarshad82 and other readers sent word that US and New York officials have unsealed more than 90 indictments of money mules and others accused of helping siphon more than $3M from 5 banks and dozens of individuals, and sending it overseas. The Manhattan US Attorney announced charges against 37 individuals and New York charged 55. Most of those indicted are foreign students who came to the US on exchange visitor visas. Most are from Russia, the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, or Belarus. Here is the FBI's lengthy press release. A security blogger has put up Facebook party photos of some of the indicted individuals who are still at large.

An anonymous reader writes "While the Senate is still debating a bill that would force registrars and ISPs to block access to sites deemed 'infringing,' it appears that the White House's IP Czar is already holding meetings with ISPs, registrars and payment processors to start voluntarily blocking access to sites it doesn't like. Initially, they're focused on online pharmacies, but does anyone think it will only be limited to such sites? ICANN apparently has refused to attend the meetings, pointing out that they're 'inappropriate.' Doesn't it seem wrong for the US government to be pushing private companies to censor the Internet without due process?"

eldavojohn writes "After developing and using TaintDroid, several universities found that of 30 popular free Android apps, half were sharing GPS data and phone numbers with advertisers and remote servers. A few months ago, one app was sending phone numbers to a remote server in China but today the situation looks a lot more pervasive. In their paper (PDF), the researchers blasted Google saying 'Android's coarse grained access control provides insufficient protection against third-party applications seeking to collect sensitive data.' Google's response: 'Android has taken steps to inform users of this trust relationship and to limit the amount of trust a user must grant to any given application developer. We also provide developers with best practices about how to handle user data. We consistently advise users to only install apps they trust.'"

Julie188 writes "The United States Patent and Trademark Office asked for public input on how it should use the Supreme Court's Bilski decision to guide it when granting new patents. Not surprisingly, Red Hat took them up on it. The USPTO should use Bilski and the fact that the machine transformation test is 'important' to Just Say No to most software patents, it advised. Rob Tiller, Red Hat's Vice President and Assistant General Counsel, IP, is hopeful that the patent office will listen and put an end to the crazy software patent situation that has turned patents into weapons that hinder innovation."

r3lody writes "I have enjoyed other cookbooks in the O'Reilly library of computer texts, so when I saw JavaScript Cookbook by Shelley Powers in the catalog, I jumped at it. The description mentioned that the book would cover HTML5 and ECMAScript 5, so I really wanted to learn the new capabilities of both. I did get to learn a lot, but I wonder if these new features are too new." Keep reading for the rest of Ray's review. JavaScript Cookbook author Shelley Powers pages 560 publisher O'Reilly Media rating 7/10 reviewer Ray Lodato ISBN 978-0596806132 summary A well-constructed collection of JavaScript recipes, with forward-looking samples of ECMAScript 5 and HTML5 Like other cookbooks in the O'Reilly library, this one is organized as a series of specific problems, with their solutions neatly presented and grouped into the major chapters. Each solution has a discussion to flesh out the details. The website has downloadable copies of the examples in the book, which I used to test out the various recipes. ECMAScript 5 is fairly new, and HTML5 is still under development, so I made sure I had the latest stable versions of the major browsers (Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari) to see how they would cope. The HTML5 features are very sparsely supported as of yet, so those portions of the book should be considered more of a sampling of things to come rather than a definitive set of solutions.

The first five chapters of the book are somewhat unremarkable. They start out easily enough with recipes for handling JavaScript strings. The discussion of String objects and literals obviously implies that the reader is already somewhat familiar with Object terminology and functionality. That makes this book unsuitable for beginners. The following chapter contains recipes for handling regular expressions. It starts off with an introduction to the basics, which are nothing that a somewhat savvy shell programmer should be familiar with. The remaining sections cover pretty basic problems. The only interesting ones I noted handled highlighted found phrases on a web page.

Chapter 3 covers dates, time, and timers. Handling dates is shown to be pretty straightforward, and one-shot and recurring timers are presented in a clear, easy-to-understand manner to wrap up the chapter. The next chapter, Working with Number and Math, consists mostly of basic mathematical solutions. The fifth chapter rounds up the basics with recipes for working with arrays and loops. As a Perl programmer, I found this to be familiar territory – especially the discussions of the splice and map method, and using associative arrays.

Chapters 6-10 provide the first real appetizing recipes in the JavaScript Cookbook. Shelley first discusses building reusability using function definitions, anonymous functions, recursion, scopes and memorization. It's starting with this chapter that you really begin to learn how to use JavaScript rather than just playing around with it.

Event Handling is the first major hurdle a procedural programmer needs to overcome to use JavaScript effectively. Various event triggers are discussed in the sections of chapter 7. While most of the code is easy to comprehend, I ran into problems when using the new HTML5 drag and drop was discussed. I had to ask myself could drag-and-drop be any more complicated? This example worked on all but Opera, but the solution is convoluted. Overall, if you really want to know how screwed up code must be to work in all different browsers, chapter 7 (Handling Events) will demonstrate it. Internet Explorer's differences is the reason for most of the odd workarounds in this chapter.

We would all like each browser to work just like another but, unfortunately, each one has its own quirks. Chapter 8 talks about the various ways browsers handle color support and page sizes. The chapter ends by dealing with dynamic pages and bookmarking their state.

The first time I worked with JavaScript was when I was coding some form handling. Chapter 9 covers the ways to handle forms and modify web pages. The most useful recipes (at least, for me) were the last two, which showed how to hide and display form elements on the fly, and how to modify selection lists based on other form element entries.

All programming involves error handling and usually some debugging. Chapter 10 describes the various ways to handle errors, followed by a well-written set of tips on how to use the debuggers and inspectors for the major browsers.

The following three chapters all deal with manipulating web pages. The first of these contained a lot of discussion of namespaces. Namespaces can be confusing, and I didn't really understand them much better after I was finished reading. In addition, you are presented with several boilerplate templates, with little information as to why you would use them. I also had problems with some of the downloaded samples not running correctly on my browsers. Chapter 12 contains lots of fun ways to manipulate page content, with specific instructions on how to handle IE and its different ways of doing things. Finally, chapter 13 provided some good basics of page manipulation, including creating collapsible sections, and creating tab pages.

Accessibility is the major topic of chapter 14, where you are introduced to ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications). Many web pages are not built with accessibility in mind, so this chapter is very important for giving the web designer the tools for well-designed and usable pages. Some ARIA techniques are straightforward, but others (such as creating collapsible form sections) are much more complex to get right. This chapter does a marvelous job, even though it is somewhat hard to read.

The next chapter covers creating media-rich and interactive applications. This chapter was pretty deep, and the examples were not necessarily bad, but the techniques required need the coder to really think clearly about how to accomplish their goal.

Chapters 16 and 17 cover JavaScript Objects and Libraries. In the Objects chapter, there is quite a bit of discussion around ECMAScript 5, which is not yet well supported in the browsers normally available. As one example, Shelley does say regarding the preventExtensions feature "by the time this book hits the streets, I expect (hope) at least a couple of browsers will have implemented this feature". The Libraries chapter was more problematic in that I was not able to follow along and get the supplied samples working correctly. In addition, the coverage of jQuery was only a high-level overview, leaving the reader wanting more. In her defense, Shelley acknowledges the breadth of the jQuery topic and refers you to the jQuery Cookbook for more information. Overall, I found chapter 17 unsatisfying and abrupt in its coverage.

Communication via Ajax is the main topic for the recipes of chapter 18. Without a proper web server at my disposal, I could not properly evaluate the workability of the solutions. I was also somewhat amused that one of the solutions was described with the caveat that it's not a recommended procedure. I would ask why it was included in that case.

The Working with Structured Data chapter starts by covering JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), but then adds in recipes for handling hCalendar Microformat Annotations and RDFa. The transition was a little jarring, and not overly useful, in my opinion.

The penultimate chapter covered the issues around persistent information. While using URLs and cookies to maintain some state are discussed, much of this chapter revolves around new capabilities made available in the new HTML5 specifications. Unfortunately, most browsers either do not support, or only partially support these features, so the information is only useful as a "taste of things to come".

The final chapter covers the use of JavaScript in non-browser environments. Widgets and gadgets are simple JavaScript applications that are easily coded and disseminated. There are discussions of creating applications for the iPhone, Android phones, and Blackberry phones.

As I step back and reflect on this book, I think that many topics are solutions that cannot be implemented because the typically available browsers don't support the new features yet. If a web page designer wants their site to be available to users now, they need to focus on the features that are well entrenched across the internet. Having so many solutions based on features and capabilities that are still being defined is only useful as academic exercises. I would have preferred that the JavaScript Cookbook be more useful for the state of the web right now. That is why I'm rating it only 7 out of 10.

You can purchase JavaScript 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.

r3lody writes "I have enjoyed other cookbooks in the O'Reilly library of computer texts, so when I saw JavaScript Cookbook by Shelley Powers in the catalog, I jumped at it. The description mentioned that the book would cover HTML5 and ECMAScript 5, so I really wanted to learn the new capabilities of both. I did get to learn a lot, but I wonder if these new features are too new." Keep reading for the rest of Ray's review. JavaScript Cookbook author Shelley Powers pages 560 publisher O'Reilly Media rating 7/10 reviewer Ray Lodato ISBN 978-0596806132 summary A well-constructed collection of JavaScript recipes, with forward-looking samples of ECMAScript 5 and HTML5 Like other cookbooks in the O'Reilly library, this one is organized as a series of specific problems, with their solutions neatly presented and grouped into the major chapters. Each solution has a discussion to flesh out the details. The website has downloadable copies of the examples in the book, which I used to test out the various recipes. ECMAScript 5 is fairly new, and HTML5 is still under development, so I made sure I had the latest stable versions of the major browsers (Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari) to see how they would cope. The HTML5 features are very sparsely supported as of yet, so those portions of the book should be considered more of a sampling of things to come rather than a definitive set of solutions.

The first five chapters of the book are somewhat unremarkable. They start out easily enough with recipes for handling JavaScript strings. The discussion of String objects and literals obviously implies that the reader is already somewhat familiar with Object terminology and functionality. That makes this book unsuitable for beginners. The following chapter contains recipes for handling regular expressions. It starts off with an introduction to the basics, which are nothing that a somewhat savvy shell programmer should be familiar with. The remaining sections cover pretty basic problems. The only interesting ones I noted handled highlighted found phrases on a web page.

Chapter 3 covers dates, time, and timers. Handling dates is shown to be pretty straightforward, and one-shot and recurring timers are presented in a clear, easy-to-understand manner to wrap up the chapter. The next chapter, Working with Number and Math, consists mostly of basic mathematical solutions. The fifth chapter rounds up the basics with recipes for working with arrays and loops. As a Perl programmer, I found this to be familiar territory – especially the discussions of the splice and map method, and using associative arrays.

Chapters 6-10 provide the first real appetizing recipes in the JavaScript Cookbook. Shelley first discusses building reusability using function definitions, anonymous functions, recursion, scopes and memorization. It's starting with this chapter that you really begin to learn how to use JavaScript rather than just playing around with it.

Event Handling is the first major hurdle a procedural programmer needs to overcome to use JavaScript effectively. Various event triggers are discussed in the sections of chapter 7. While most of the code is easy to comprehend, I ran into problems when using the new HTML5 drag and drop was discussed. I had to ask myself could drag-and-drop be any more complicated? This example worked on all but Opera, but the solution is convoluted. Overall, if you really want to know how screwed up code must be to work in all different browsers, chapter 7 (Handling Events) will demonstrate it. Internet Explorer's differences is the reason for most of the odd workarounds in this chapter.

We would all like each browser to work just like another but, unfortunately, each one has its own quirks. Chapter 8 talks about the various ways browsers handle color support and page sizes. The chapter ends by dealing with dynamic pages and bookmarking their state.

The first time I worked with JavaScript was when I was coding some form handling. Chapter 9 covers the ways to handle forms and modify web pages. The most useful recipes (at least, for me) were the last two, which showed how to hide and display form elements on the fly, and how to modify selection lists based on other form element entries.

All programming involves error handling and usually some debugging. Chapter 10 describes the various ways to handle errors, followed by a well-written set of tips on how to use the debuggers and inspectors for the major browsers.

The following three chapters all deal with manipulating web pages. The first of these contained a lot of discussion of namespaces. Namespaces can be confusing, and I didn't really understand them much better after I was finished reading. In addition, you are presented with several boilerplate templates, with little information as to why you would use them. I also had problems with some of the downloaded samples not running correctly on my browsers. Chapter 12 contains lots of fun ways to manipulate page content, with specific instructions on how to handle IE and its different ways of doing things. Finally, chapter 13 provided some good basics of page manipulation, including creating collapsible sections, and creating tab pages.

Accessibility is the major topic of chapter 14, where you are introduced to ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications). Many web pages are not built with accessibility in mind, so this chapter is very important for giving the web designer the tools for well-designed and usable pages. Some ARIA techniques are straightforward, but others (such as creating collapsible form sections) are much more complex to get right. This chapter does a marvelous job, even though it is somewhat hard to read.

The next chapter covers creating media-rich and interactive applications. This chapter was pretty deep, and the examples were not necessarily bad, but the techniques required need the coder to really think clearly about how to accomplish their goal.

Chapters 16 and 17 cover JavaScript Objects and Libraries. In the Objects chapter, there is quite a bit of discussion around ECMAScript 5, which is not yet well supported in the browsers normally available. As one example, Shelley does say regarding the preventExtensions feature "by the time this book hits the streets, I expect (hope) at least a couple of browsers will have implemented this feature". The Libraries chapter was more problematic in that I was not able to follow along and get the supplied samples working correctly. In addition, the coverage of jQuery was only a high-level overview, leaving the reader wanting more. In her defense, Shelley acknowledges the breadth of the jQuery topic and refers you to the jQuery Cookbook for more information. Overall, I found chapter 17 unsatisfying and abrupt in its coverage.

Communication via Ajax is the main topic for the recipes of chapter 18. Without a proper web server at my disposal, I could not properly evaluate the workability of the solutions. I was also somewhat amused that one of the solutions was described with the caveat that it's not a recommended procedure. I would ask why it was included in that case.

The Working with Structured Data chapter starts by covering JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), but then adds in recipes for handling hCalendar Microformat Annotations and RDFa. The transition was a little jarring, and not overly useful, in my opinion.

The penultimate chapter covered the issues around persistent information. While using URLs and cookies to maintain some state are discussed, much of this chapter revolves around new capabilities made available in the new HTML5 specifications. Unfortunately, most browsers either do not support, or only partially support these features, so the information is only useful as a "taste of things to come".

The final chapter covers the use of JavaScript in non-browser environments. Widgets and gadgets are simple JavaScript applications that are easily coded and disseminated. There are discussions of creating applications for the iPhone, Android phones, and Blackberry phones.

As I step back and reflect on this book, I think that many topics are solutions that cannot be implemented because the typically available browsers don't support the new features yet. If a web page designer wants their site to be available to users now, they need to focus on the features that are well entrenched across the internet. Having so many solutions based on features and capabilities that are still being defined is only useful as academic exercises. I would have preferred that the JavaScript Cookbook be more useful for the state of the web right now. That is why I'm rating it only 7 out of 10.

You can purchase JavaScript 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.

astroengine writes "After all the kerfuffle of 'Ambassadorgate' — when the UK media went nuts over the rumored promotion of Mazlan Othman to become the UN's first choice as mankind's alien point of contact — it would appear that gamblers saw this as a tip that an alien landing was imminent."

Vigile writes "New solid state drives are released all the time, and the performance improvements on them have started to stagnate as the limits of the SATA 3.0 Gb/s are reached. SATA 6G drives are still coming out and some newer PCI Express based drives are also available for those users with a higher budget. OCZ is taking it another step with a new storage interface called High Speed Data Link (HSDL) that extends the PCI Express bus via mini-SAS cables and removes the bottleneck of SATA-based RAID controllers thus increasing theoretical performance and allowing the use of command queueing — vital to high IO's in a RAID configuration. PC Perspective has a full performance review that details the speed and IO improvements and while initial versions will be available at up to 960 GB (and a $2800 price tag), in reality, the cost-per-GB is competitive with other high-end SSDs when you get to the 240GB and above options"

Vigile writes "New solid state drives are released all the time, and the performance improvements on them have started to stagnate as the limits of the SATA 3.0 Gb/s are reached. SATA 6G drives are still coming out and some newer PCI Express based drives are also available for those users with a higher budget. OCZ is taking it another step with a new storage interface called High Speed Data Link (HSDL) that extends the PCI Express bus via mini-SAS cables and removes the bottleneck of SATA-based RAID controllers thus increasing theoretical performance and allowing the use of command queueing — vital to high IO's in a RAID configuration. PC Perspective has a full performance review that details the speed and IO improvements and while initial versions will be available at up to 960 GB (and a $2800 price tag), in reality, the cost-per-GB is competitive with other high-end SSDs when you get to the 240GB and above options"

eldavojohn writes "The Bad Astronomer brings word of an asteroid discovered with a tiny chance of hitting Earth. While it's only 50 meters wide, it could have the impact of a 20 megaton bomb. It's still twenty million miles away so if it hits us, it won't happen until 2098. The real story here is how a remarkable telescope, dubbed Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System, that went operational in May found its first potential target in our growing impact alert system for Earth."

tetrahedrassface writes "As the US economic woes continue unabated, a German company is bringing gold-bearing ATMs to Mainstreet America. The machines accept credit cards, and will dispense 1 gram, 5 gram, 10 gram and 1 ounce units, as well as various gold coins. The company hopes to install 35 bullion machines in the United States this year, and will hopefully have several hundred up and running by next year. The machines will be decorated like giant gold ingots and be over two meters tall. Physical gold has both pros and cons, but from a safety standpoint would it be fine to have a couple of ounces in your pocket while walking around the mall? The giant, gold-dispensing ATMs will monitor the market conditions for gold every 10 minutes in order to reflect spot price changes as they occur." We already covered similar machines installed in travel hubs across Germany.

Gamasutra has a lengthy interview with NetDevil's Ryan Seabury, creative director for LEGO Universe, which is due to launch next month. He talks about some of the difficulties in graphically optimizing a game with so many discrete, interactive objects, and mentions that they'll be keeping an eye out for inappropriate contructs to avoid problems similar to those that cropped up with Spore. "One thing we can say is when you build models you have your own property, and you can share that if you want to. If you share something publicly, it will be monitored by a human before it's seen by other people." Seabury also explains their desire to keep the game simple, using players' creativity as a driving force, as well as NetDevil's decision to stay away from a micro-transaction business model.

stevegee58 writes "Slashdot readers may recall the case of a Maryland motorcyclist (Anthony Graber) arrested and charged with wiretapping violations (a felony) when he recorded his interaction with a Maryland State Trooper. Today, Judge Emory A. Pitt threw out the wiretapping charges against Graber, leaving only his traffic violations to be decided on his October 12 trial date. 'The judge ruled that Maryland's wire tap law allows recording of both voice and sound in areas where privacy cannot be expected. He ruled that a police officer on a traffic stop has no expectation of privacy.' A happy day for freedom-loving Marylanders and Americans in general."

jamie passes along a humorous article at The Guardian which pokes fun at the shallow and formulaic science journalism typical of many mainstream news outlets. Quoting: In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of 'scare quotes' to ensure that it's clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever. ... If the research is about a potential cure, or a solution to a problem, this paragraph will describe how it will raise hopes for a group of sufferers or victims. This paragraph elaborates on the claim, adding weasel-words like 'the scientists say' to shift responsibility for establishing the likely truth or accuracy of the research findings on to absolutely anybody else but me, the journalist. ... 'Basically, this is a brief soundbite,' the scientist will say, from a department and university that I will give brief credit to. 'The existing science is a bit dodgy, whereas my conclusion seems bang on,' she or he will continue."

Muad writes "John Calcote is a senior software engineer in Novell's Linux business, who after slogging up the steep learning curve the Autotools triad poses to those packaging software according to the portable GNU conventions for the first time, very kindly decided to make the experience easier to newcomers by sharing his years of experience and carefully crafted bag of tricks. His book is a welcome update to a field that has not seen entries now for a full ten years, so long has been the time since GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool by Gary V. Vaughn, Ben Ellison, Tom Tromey, and Ian Lance Taylor hit the shelves. Unfortunately, the publishing industry is driven by the need to turn a profit to fund its endeavors, and specialist items like this book are not obvious candidates for volume selling - which is a credit to No Starch Press' willingness to venture down this path." Keep reading for the rest of Federico's review. Autotools: A practitioner's guide to GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool author John Calcote pages 360 publisher No Starch Press rating 8/10 reviewer Federico Lucifredi ISBN 1593272065 summary Teaches how to master the Autotools build system to maximize your software The book opens with John's experiences in adopting the Autotools, and quickly offers what is in my view a very important word of caution that is often lacking in the few tutorials I have seen on the Net: the Autotools are not simply a set of tools but foremost the encoded embodiment of a set of practices and expectations in the way software should be packaged the GNU way. While it is acceptable for beginners not to know what these expectations are, the right frame of mind to approach the Autotools is to focus on learning what way the Autotools operate, what they are trying to accomplish, and why. Attempting to use the Autotools without understanding the bigger picture will lead to very high amounts of pain, as it is one of the toolsets most difficult to adapt for use separate from the policies they represent, so strongly are these conventions embedded in their fabric. With this understanding, it becomes possible to generate extensive configurations with a few lines of Autoconf or Automake - without this understanding, it very quickly becomes a battle to force a round peg into a square tool.

John's style is more extensive and takes a longer path to the "technical meat" of the problem than the 10-year old alternative, but in this reader's opinion it flows significantly better as there is an underlying story, a thread that connects the bits of what is otherwise a pretty arid subject. For those masters of shell-fu, this book is a page-turner, while for mere mortals it is a good, approachable, path into a difficult skill.

The book is structured around the packaging of two different projects, the first being a simplified "Hello, World" project to provide a digestible introduction to the processes and technology of the Autotools, while the second representing the full-blown packaging of a complex, real-world project (the FLAIM high-performance database). This is a very good approach, breaking the theory into many practical examples of practice, and providing many ready-made bits that the rest of us can start our own configuration build files from. The result is a first half providing a gentler, streamlined introduction to the subject matter, before the full jump into the gory details of the most complex possibilities the toolset offers. While it must be noted that John attempts to keep away from those most fine details which "may be subject to change" between minor releases of the tooling, which is doubtlessly good for both our scripts' and the book's shelf life, it must be observed that he does not shy away from very dense (and otherwise utterly undocumented) material, such as the use of M4 macros in Autoconf, something a colleague of mine once pointed to me as "the one more reason I'd rather chew broken glass than deal with Autotools".

Assuming you have the requisite knowledge of Make, Shell scripting (particularly Bash), and GCC that are essential to a developer, packager, maintainer or buildmaster of a Linux, BSD or *NIX project, or that you are on your way to achieving those skills, this is a book that belongs in your shelf, right next to the RPM documentation. This is material for experts or experts in the making, but in my opinion you will find no better introduction to this complex subject. I had it on my wish list well before it was ever printed, and its presence on my desk caused several other developers in my office to order their copies pretty much on the spot upon finding out of its existence. Either as a learning tool for a skill you are trying to attain, or as a reference to turn to when faced with the complexities of this unique set of tools, this book is well worth its price tag.

I certainly hope this is not the last publication we see on the Autotools in this decade, but either way, it is a good start indeed - and my hope is that the publisher will refresh the title when an update is warranted, without waiting ten years!

Federico Lucifredi is the maintainer of man (1) and a Product Manager for the SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE distributions.

You can purchase Autotools: A practitioner's guide to GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Muad writes "John Calcote is a senior software engineer in Novell's Linux business, who after slogging up the steep learning curve the Autotools triad poses to those packaging software according to the portable GNU conventions for the first time, very kindly decided to make the experience easier to newcomers by sharing his years of experience and carefully crafted bag of tricks. His book is a welcome update to a field that has not seen entries now for a full ten years, so long has been the time since GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool by Gary V. Vaughn, Ben Ellison, Tom Tromey, and Ian Lance Taylor hit the shelves. Unfortunately, the publishing industry is driven by the need to turn a profit to fund its endeavors, and specialist items like this book are not obvious candidates for volume selling - which is a credit to No Starch Press' willingness to venture down this path." Keep reading for the rest of Federico's review. Autotools: A practitioner's guide to GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool author John Calcote pages 360 publisher No Starch Press rating 8/10 reviewer Federico Lucifredi ISBN 1593272065 summary Teaches how to master the Autotools build system to maximize your software The book opens with John's experiences in adopting the Autotools, and quickly offers what is in my view a very important word of caution that is often lacking in the few tutorials I have seen on the Net: the Autotools are not simply a set of tools but foremost the encoded embodiment of a set of practices and expectations in the way software should be packaged the GNU way. While it is acceptable for beginners not to know what these expectations are, the right frame of mind to approach the Autotools is to focus on learning what way the Autotools operate, what they are trying to accomplish, and why. Attempting to use the Autotools without understanding the bigger picture will lead to very high amounts of pain, as it is one of the toolsets most difficult to adapt for use separate from the policies they represent, so strongly are these conventions embedded in their fabric. With this understanding, it becomes possible to generate extensive configurations with a few lines of Autoconf or Automake - without this understanding, it very quickly becomes a battle to force a round peg into a square tool.

John's style is more extensive and takes a longer path to the "technical meat" of the problem than the 10-year old alternative, but in this reader's opinion it flows significantly better as there is an underlying story, a thread that connects the bits of what is otherwise a pretty arid subject. For those masters of shell-fu, this book is a page-turner, while for mere mortals it is a good, approachable, path into a difficult skill.

The book is structured around the packaging of two different projects, the first being a simplified "Hello, World" project to provide a digestible introduction to the processes and technology of the Autotools, while the second representing the full-blown packaging of a complex, real-world project (the FLAIM high-performance database). This is a very good approach, breaking the theory into many practical examples of practice, and providing many ready-made bits that the rest of us can start our own configuration build files from. The result is a first half providing a gentler, streamlined introduction to the subject matter, before the full jump into the gory details of the most complex possibilities the toolset offers. While it must be noted that John attempts to keep away from those most fine details which "may be subject to change" between minor releases of the tooling, which is doubtlessly good for both our scripts' and the book's shelf life, it must be observed that he does not shy away from very dense (and otherwise utterly undocumented) material, such as the use of M4 macros in Autoconf, something a colleague of mine once pointed to me as "the one more reason I'd rather chew broken glass than deal with Autotools".

Assuming you have the requisite knowledge of Make, Shell scripting (particularly Bash), and GCC that are essential to a developer, packager, maintainer or buildmaster of a Linux, BSD or *NIX project, or that you are on your way to achieving those skills, this is a book that belongs in your shelf, right next to the RPM documentation. This is material for experts or experts in the making, but in my opinion you will find no better introduction to this complex subject. I had it on my wish list well before it was ever printed, and its presence on my desk caused several other developers in my office to order their copies pretty much on the spot upon finding out of its existence. Either as a learning tool for a skill you are trying to attain, or as a reference to turn to when faced with the complexities of this unique set of tools, this book is well worth its price tag.

I certainly hope this is not the last publication we see on the Autotools in this decade, but either way, it is a good start indeed - and my hope is that the publisher will refresh the title when an update is warranted, without waiting ten years!

Federico Lucifredi is the maintainer of man (1) and a Product Manager for the SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE distributions.

You can purchase Autotools: A practitioner's guide to GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool 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 "A few weeks ago, Senators Patrick Leahy and Orrin Hatch introduced the 'Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act' (COICA) bill, which was discussed here on Slashdot. The main part of the bill would allow the Justice Department to shut down websites that it deems are 'dedicated to infringing activities,' without a trial (due process is so old fashioned). Of course, in reviewing the bill, it's important to note that pretty much every new technology in the entertainment industry over the last century was deemed 'dedicated to infringing activities,' so here's a list of all of the technologies COICA would have banned in the past, including Hollywood itself, radio, cable television, the photocopier, the iPod and more."

adeelarshad82 writes "Days after a site update unleashed a Twitter cross-site scripting attack, the micro-blogging site was again hit with a bug that spread via questionable links. The offending messages appeared on a user's Twitter feed with 'WTF:' followed by a link. If you clicked on that link, you were taken to a blank page, but behind the scenes, the worm would post vulgar messages on your account that discussed, well, sex involving goats."

eldavojohn writes "The BBC and AFP are releasing more juicy details about the now infamous Stuxnet worm that Iranian officials have confirmed infected 30,000 industrial computers inside Iran following those exact fears. The targeted systems that the worm is designed to infect are Siemens SCADA systems. Talking heads are speculating that the worm is too complex for an individual or group, causing blame to be placed on Israel or even the United States — although the US official claims they do not know the origin of the virus. Iran claims it did not infect or place any risk to the new nuclear reactor in Bushehr, which experts are suspecting was the ultimate target of the worm."

eldavojohn writes "The BBC and AFP are releasing more juicy details about the now infamous Stuxnet worm that Iranian officials have confirmed infected 30,000 industrial computers inside Iran following those exact fears. The targeted systems that the worm is designed to infect are Siemens SCADA systems. Talking heads are speculating that the worm is too complex for an individual or group, causing blame to be placed on Israel or even the United States — although the US official claims they do not know the origin of the virus. Iran claims it did not infect or place any risk to the new nuclear reactor in Bushehr, which experts are suspecting was the ultimate target of the worm."

eldavojohn writes "The BBC and AFP are releasing more juicy details about the now infamous Stuxnet worm that Iranian officials have confirmed infected 30,000 industrial computers inside Iran following those exact fears. The targeted systems that the worm is designed to infect are Siemens SCADA systems. Talking heads are speculating that the worm is too complex for an individual or group, causing blame to be placed on Israel or even the United States — although the US official claims they do not know the origin of the virus. Iran claims it did not infect or place any risk to the new nuclear reactor in Bushehr, which experts are suspecting was the ultimate target of the worm."

YokimaSun writes "Following up on yesterday's story about the PS3 being hacked by one of its own official controllers, there's now a guide in English that details how to mod a Sixaxxis controller. But thanks to the very latest releases, if you don't like soldering you can now use an iPod, a Pandora console or even a Dingoo console. Finally, Jaicrab has released a USB firmware loader which will come in handy once the first custom firmware for the PS3 is released. Maybe then we will get region-free Blu-ray, PS1 and PS2 games."

YokimaSun writes "Following up on yesterday's story about the PS3 being hacked by one of its own official controllers, there's now a guide in English that details how to mod a Sixaxxis controller. But thanks to the very latest releases, if you don't like soldering you can now use an iPod, a Pandora console or even a Dingoo console. Finally, Jaicrab has released a USB firmware loader which will come in handy once the first custom firmware for the PS3 is released. Maybe then we will get region-free Blu-ray, PS1 and PS2 games."

YokimaSun writes "Following up on yesterday's story about the PS3 being hacked by one of its own official controllers, there's now a guide in English that details how to mod a Sixaxxis controller. But thanks to the very latest releases, if you don't like soldering you can now use an iPod, a Pandora console or even a Dingoo console. Finally, Jaicrab has released a USB firmware loader which will come in handy once the first custom firmware for the PS3 is released. Maybe then we will get region-free Blu-ray, PS1 and PS2 games."

Julie188 writes "That was probably the only time 'DNS' will ever be a trending term on Twitter. The cause was Facebook's 2.5 hour outage on Thursday, which incorrectly told users trying to access the site that a DNS error was to blame. In truth, experts who've read Facebook's explanation say the site went down because Facebook gave itself a distributed denial-of-service attack when a system admin misconfigured a database. So why was DNS blamed? The 27-year-old communications protocol has been known to cause other, somewhat similar outages."

mykos writes "Remember when the Pentagon said they were arranging a taxpayer-funded, government-sponsored book burning a couple weeks ago? Well, they made good on that threat, purchasing 9,500 copies of the book to be destroyed. The publisher, St. Martin's Press, has redacted anything the Pentagon told them to redact in the upcoming second run of the book. They Department of Defense has not yet paid for the burned books, but says they are 'in the process.' Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Col. April Cunningham gave this statement: 'DoD decided to purchase copies of the first printing because they contained information which could cause damage to national security.' Whew, looks like we're safe now."

jamie points out this piece from always-entertaining Bad Astronomer Phil Plait, who asks this week the simple question "What happens if you put your hand in the beam of the Large Hadron Collider?" The thrill of discovery to me doesn't sound worth the worst-case scenario.