Slashdot Mirror

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Neil McAllister examines how the ongoing rise of netbooks, decline of desktops, and the smartphone explosion are reconfiguring the processor market, putting Intel's Atom processor on a clear collision course with ARM. And here, on the low end of computing, Intel may have finally met its match. Thanks to a unique licensing model, ARM will ship an estimated 90 chips per second this year, and the catalog of OSes and apps available for ARM has been growing for decades, including several complete Linux distributions such as Google's Android OS and Chrome OS when it ships. 'One thing ARM doesn't have, however, is Windows,' McAllister writes, something that could ultimately stymie ARM's plans to compete on the low end of the netbook market. And yet Intel's bet on Windows and its x86 compatibility appeal among developers could backfire, McAllister writes. In the end, it's all about performance. Thus far, Intel has yet to demonstrate a model with power characteristics comparable to those of the current generation of ARM chips, which are fast proving their ability to handle high-performance applications."

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Neil McAllister examines how the ongoing rise of netbooks, decline of desktops, and the smartphone explosion are reconfiguring the processor market, putting Intel's Atom processor on a clear collision course with ARM. And here, on the low end of computing, Intel may have finally met its match. Thanks to a unique licensing model, ARM will ship an estimated 90 chips per second this year, and the catalog of OSes and apps available for ARM has been growing for decades, including several complete Linux distributions such as Google's Android OS and Chrome OS when it ships. 'One thing ARM doesn't have, however, is Windows,' McAllister writes, something that could ultimately stymie ARM's plans to compete on the low end of the netbook market. And yet Intel's bet on Windows and its x86 compatibility appeal among developers could backfire, McAllister writes. In the end, it's all about performance. Thus far, Intel has yet to demonstrate a model with power characteristics comparable to those of the current generation of ARM chips, which are fast proving their ability to handle high-performance applications."

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Neil McAllister examines how the ongoing rise of netbooks, decline of desktops, and the smartphone explosion are reconfiguring the processor market, putting Intel's Atom processor on a clear collision course with ARM. And here, on the low end of computing, Intel may have finally met its match. Thanks to a unique licensing model, ARM will ship an estimated 90 chips per second this year, and the catalog of OSes and apps available for ARM has been growing for decades, including several complete Linux distributions such as Google's Android OS and Chrome OS when it ships. 'One thing ARM doesn't have, however, is Windows,' McAllister writes, something that could ultimately stymie ARM's plans to compete on the low end of the netbook market. And yet Intel's bet on Windows and its x86 compatibility appeal among developers could backfire, McAllister writes. In the end, it's all about performance. Thus far, Intel has yet to demonstrate a model with power characteristics comparable to those of the current generation of ARM chips, which are fast proving their ability to handle high-performance applications."

cecille writes "Voting machine maker Sequoia announced on Tuesday that they plan to release the source code for their new optical-scan voting machine. The source code will be released in November for public review. The company claims the announcement is unrelated to the recent release of the source code for a prototype voting machine by the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation. According to a VP quoted in the press release, 'Security through obfuscation and secrecy is not security.'"

Ian Lamont writes "Remember the report last year that the FBI was concerned about a 'vishing' exploit relating to the Asterisk IP PBX software? Digium played down the report, noting that it was based on a bug that had already been patched, but now the company's open-source community director says that attacks on Asterisk installations are 'endemic.' There have been dozens of reported vishing attacks in recent weeks, says the article: 'The victims typically bank with smaller regional institutions, which typically have fewer resources to detect scams. Scammers hack into phone systems and then call victims, playing prerecorded messages that say there has been a billing error or warn them that the bank account has been suspended because of suspicious activity. If the worried customer enters his account number and ATM password, the bad guys use that information to make fake debit cards and empty their victim's bank accounts.'"

David Gerard writes "Lord Peter Mandelson has carefully ignored the Gowers Report and the Carter Report, instead taking the advice of his good friend David Geffen and announcing that 'three strikes and you're out' will become law in Britain. The Open Rights Group has, of course, hit the roof. Oh, and never mind MI5 and the police pointing out that widespread encryption will become normal, hampering their efforts to keep up with little things like impending terrorist atrocities. Still, worth it to stop a few Lily Allen tracks being shared, right?"

David Gerard writes "Lord Peter Mandelson has carefully ignored the Gowers Report and the Carter Report, instead taking the advice of his good friend David Geffen and announcing that 'three strikes and you're out' will become law in Britain. The Open Rights Group has, of course, hit the roof. Oh, and never mind MI5 and the police pointing out that widespread encryption will become normal, hampering their efforts to keep up with little things like impending terrorist atrocities. Still, worth it to stop a few Lily Allen tracks being shared, right?"

David Gerard writes "Lord Peter Mandelson has carefully ignored the Gowers Report and the Carter Report, instead taking the advice of his good friend David Geffen and announcing that 'three strikes and you're out' will become law in Britain. The Open Rights Group has, of course, hit the roof. Oh, and never mind MI5 and the police pointing out that widespread encryption will become normal, hampering their efforts to keep up with little things like impending terrorist atrocities. Still, worth it to stop a few Lily Allen tracks being shared, right?"

sleeponthemic writes "Developer 2D Boy has posted the final results of their 'pay-what-you-want' experiment, selling their World of Goo game for an unrestricted price. After coming to the attention of Slashdot, a further ~26,000 sales were recorded, bringing the total to 83,147. Note that publicizing crucial mid-sale statistics — such as the revelation that ~17,000 people chose to 'donate' $0.01 — seems to have affected the average donation, which increased from $2.03 to above $3 by the end of the week." They also show some interesting charts which break down the average donation by operating system, saying "We were expecting the average price paid to be highest for Linux users and lowest for Windows users, but the gap was larger than we thought it would be."

robotsrule writes "This article contains notes from a 1-hour phone call with Ugobe founder Derek Dotson, now CEO of Innvo Labs Corporation, the company that acquired the rights to Pleo at the recent bankruptcy auction. Dotson reveals the hidden story behind Pleo's rise, fall, and resurrection including intriguing facts about the money trail and what he feels caused Ugobe to fail, including how he had to save Pleo's future on more than one occasion. He also lays out in plain detail Innvo Labs's strategy to help owners of older Pleos and those whose units were swallowed up by Ugobe's bankruptcy." We've been following the Pleo saga for years.

robotsrule writes "This article contains notes from a 1-hour phone call with Ugobe founder Derek Dotson, now CEO of Innvo Labs Corporation, the company that acquired the rights to Pleo at the recent bankruptcy auction. Dotson reveals the hidden story behind Pleo's rise, fall, and resurrection including intriguing facts about the money trail and what he feels caused Ugobe to fail, including how he had to save Pleo's future on more than one occasion. He also lays out in plain detail Innvo Labs's strategy to help owners of older Pleos and those whose units were swallowed up by Ugobe's bankruptcy." We've been following the Pleo saga for years.

robotsrule writes "This article contains notes from a 1-hour phone call with Ugobe founder Derek Dotson, now CEO of Innvo Labs Corporation, the company that acquired the rights to Pleo at the recent bankruptcy auction. Dotson reveals the hidden story behind Pleo's rise, fall, and resurrection including intriguing facts about the money trail and what he feels caused Ugobe to fail, including how he had to save Pleo's future on more than one occasion. He also lays out in plain detail Innvo Labs's strategy to help owners of older Pleos and those whose units were swallowed up by Ugobe's bankruptcy." We've been following the Pleo saga for years.

Now that the UK is discussing plans for some form of 3-strikes regime to discourage file-sharing, TechDirt reports that the fans of due process have picked up unlikely allies: the law enforcement and spying establishments fear that a 3-strikes policy would result in far more encryption on the Net, greatly complicating their jobs. "Of course, they're not as concerned about due process and civil rights, as they are about making it more difficult to track down criminals online: 'Law enforcement groups, which include the Serious and Organized Crime Agency and the Metropolitan Police's e-crime unit, believe that more encryption will increase the costs and workload for those attempting to monitor internet traffic. ... A source involved in drafting the Bill said that the intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6, had also voiced concerns about disconnection. "The spooks hate it," the source said.'" The Times (UK) Online has more details.

The trial we discussed this spring has come to a verdict, and reader lugannerd was one of several to note a milestone in the fight against the Church of Scientology. "The French branch of the Church of Scientology was convicted of fraud and fined nearly $900,000 on Tuesday by a Paris court. But the judges did not ban the church entirely, as the prosecution had demanded, saying that a change in the law prevented such an action for fraud. The church said it would appeal. The verdict was among the most important in several years to involve the controversial group, which is registered as a religion in the United States but has no similar legal protection in France. It is considered a sect here, and says it has some 45,000 adherents, out of some 12 million worldwide. It was the first time here that the church itself had been tried and convicted, as opposed to individual members."

The risk posed by lithium batteries on airplanes is not exactly new news to this community; but the issue is starting to get wider exposure. Reader Maximum Prophet points out that as usual xkcd gets it right, and sends in an NY Times article calling the batteries a fire risk that clears security. "More than half of the 22 battery fires in the cabin of passenger planes since 1999 have been in the last three years. One air safety expert suggested that these devices might be 'the last unrestricted fire hazard' people can bring on airplanes."

The risk posed by lithium batteries on airplanes is not exactly new news to this community; but the issue is starting to get wider exposure. Reader Maximum Prophet points out that as usual xkcd gets it right, and sends in an NY Times article calling the batteries a fire risk that clears security. "More than half of the 22 battery fires in the cabin of passenger planes since 1999 have been in the last three years. One air safety expert suggested that these devices might be 'the last unrestricted fire hazard' people can bring on airplanes."

Paolo DF writes "Geocities is closing today. Its advent in 1995 was a sign of the rising 'Internet for everyone' era, when connection speeds were 1,000x or 2,000x slower than is common today. You may love it or hate it, but millions of people had their first contact with a Web presence right here. I know that Geocities is something that most Slashdotters will see as a n00b thing — the Internet was fine before Geocities — but nevertheless I think that some credit is due. Heck, there's even a modified xkcd homepage to mark the occasion." Reader commodore64_love notes a few more tributes around the Web. Last spring we discussed Yahoo's announcment that Geocities would be going away.

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "A simple experiment shows that it's easy to find the IP addresses used by the UltraSurf anti-censorship program, and block traffic to all of those IP addresses, effectively stopping UltraSurf from working. But this is not a fault of UltraSurf; rather, it demonstrates that an anti-censorship software program can be successful even if it's relatively trivial to block it." Read on for Bennett's analysis.
UltraSurf is an enormously popular program used to circumvent Internet censorship in countries like China (as well as schools and workplaces in mostly-free countries like the US, with mixed success). When you run UltraSurf on your computer, it re-routes your outgoing Internet traffic to external IP addresses controlled by UltraSurf, so that it looks to observers (and network censors) as if you are connecting to UltraSurf's IP addresses, rather than a website like YouTube or Facebook that may be banned on your network.

UltraSurf uses a list of thousands of external IP addresses, to make it non-trivial for an adversary to locate all of their IP addresses and block them all. However, using a few steps that would be obvious to many programmers facing the same problem, I did find a way to detect all the IP addresses that UltraSurf connects to, and block all of them so that UltraSurf stopped working. It would not be hard for a government censor operating the filter in a country like China to do the same thing. But this does not mean that UltraSurf's network is likely to collapse any day now; on the contrary, it means that it and similar programs are likely to flourish for years to come, since the censors obviously have other priorities.

Some background information first. Most Internet censorship circumvention tools fall into one of two categories (whose names I have just invented for the purpose of this article):
(1) Self-bootstrapping. If a program is self-bootstrapping, then in a censored country you simply run a copy of the program and it will establish a connection to an IP address outside the country, one of many in a large "cloud" of IP addresses controlled by the software program's publisher. Thereafter, your Internet usage is routed through that connection in order to evade your country's filter. UltraSurf and Tor fall into this category.
(2) Non-self-bootstrapping. To use one of these programs from a censored country, first you have to get a friend in a non-censored country to install the software on their computer (or their webserver, if they have one). Then they give this location (normally in the form of a URL) to their friend in the censored country, and their friend types that URL into their browser to circumvent their country's filtering. Psiphon is the best-known program in this group.

In 2006 I wrote that even though the first category of programs was more convenient to use (not requiring you to rely on a friend in an uncensored country), any program in that category could be blocked by an adversary willing to make only a modest amount of effort: Install the program, see what IP addresses it connects to, block those, see if the program connects to any other backup IP addresses, block those, and so on, until the program runs out of IP addresses to use. There are a few simple countermeasures that designers of a program could take, but they can also be defeated easily.

(For example, if the program randomly chooses an IP address from a large internally stored list, then you just have to run the program over and over until you've found most of the IP address chosen by its random algorithm. A cleverly written program could try to evade this as follows: Pick a set of IP addresses at random from the list, and then "lock in" to that set of IP addresses, so that future runs of the program on that PC will always connect to those IP addresses, ignoring the other ones in the list. This makes it a little bit harder for the censor to pry out all of the IP addresses in the program's internal list. But then you, as the censor, can either (a) run the program repeatedly, but find where the program stores its "locked set" and erase that between each run, so that on future runs the program will keep selecting a different IP address set, or (b) if you can't figure out where the program is storing its "locked set" between each run, then just install the program repeatedly on different machines.)

One way or another, if the program knows what IP addresses to connect to when it bootstraps itself, the attacker can trick the program into revealing all of them. The attacker doesn't even need to reverse-engineer the software to see the set of instructions that it's executing internally; they only need to be able to see the IP addresses that the program is connecting to.

Much later, I was able to reduce this to practice in an experiment on my own machine, using a Perl script, the built-in Windows "netstat" tool to list connections from locally running programs to outside IP addresses, and the "ipseccmd" tool to add new firewall rules blocking those IP addresses. After the script was left running overnight, it had collected and blocked all the IP addresses that UltraSurf apparently used, and on future runs, UltraSurf would display an error message saying that it couldn't find any IPs to connect to.

(Interestingly, netstat also showed that UltraSurf frequently opened connections to www.google.com over SSL -- that is, accessing URLs that would begin with "https://www.google.com/" -- so that traffic between the program and the Google website would be encrypted, and the contents would be invisible to censors in China. When I saw it was doing that, I added an exception to the script so that the Google IP addresses would not be blocked. Perhaps it was submitting search terms to Google in order to find pages that give the location of the latest UltraSurf connection points, or perhaps it was checking a GMail account created by UltraReach that stores messages containing more IP addresses; I didn't reverse-engineer UltraSurf to find out. But even if this was UltraSurf's clever means of obtaining new IP addresses, the system still runs up against the same problem: Any IPs that can be connected to by the UltraSurf client, can also be ascertained by the attacker who watches UltraSurf to see where it connects to, and then blocks those IPs as well.)

Naturally I had mixed feelings about pointing this out publicly, since I agree with UltraReach's goal of providing unfiltered access to users in China and other censored countries. But this idea is sufficiently obvious, that I don't think anything is lost by demonstrating it. There may be programmers interested in creating even more programs to help users in censored countries, and it would be counterproductive for those programmers to believe that existing programs like UltraSurf "magically" evade the censors by using some complex algorithm to hide the IP addresses that they connect to. In fact, the program doesn't conceal the IP addresses that it connects to (how could it?), and it would be straightforward to design and build a new program that did roughly the same thing. We should give UltraReach credit for the right things: they made a tool that provides unfiltered access to millions of people, they made the tool small and easy to use, and they arranged with their partners to subsidize the unfiltered Internet connections at no expense to those end users (although see some caveats, which have been pointed out the Hal Roberts at the Berkman Center, about the price of this "free" access). But the one thing UltraReach did not do is find a way to get around the problem of an attacker installing the problem to see what IP addresses it connects to. That's not a criticism of UltraReach; this is presumably an impossible problem to solve.

(Side note about counter- and counter-counter-measures: If UltraReach does think that censoring countries might try harder to block UltraSurf at some point in the future, they should start releasing different versions of the product every month that use different sets of IP addresses. Release one version for September 2009 that uses one set of IP addresses, then another version in October 2009 that uses another set, and so on. Then if the censors decide in December 2009 to start seriously trying to block all UltraSurf IP addresses, they'll be able to find and block all the IP addresses used by the Dec09 version, just by installing a copy of the program and observing it. But, users who downloaded previous months' versions of the program will be able to continue using their copies. If the Chinese censors wanted to find and block the IP addresses used by preivous months' copies of UltraSurf, they would have to either (a) figure out how to distinguish UltraSurf traffic from other Internet traffic, not an easy thing since UltraSurf uses encrypted traffic on port 443, the same port used for encrypted Web traffic, or (b) obtain copies of the program that users had downloaded in previous months, which is no longer as trivial as simply observing the current version of the program. The more often UltraReach swaps out a new version of UltraSurf that connects to a new set of IP addresses, the harder it will be for the Chinese censors to find all the sets of IPs used by previously released versions. However, once the Chinese censors start trying seriously to block UltraSurf, even though the trick just described will allow previous downloaders of the program to continue surfing freely, all new users who download the program after that point, can be easily blocked -- because the Chinese censors can just watch how often a new version of UltraSurf is made available for download, and block the IPs used by that copy.)

But I think the fact that the Chinese have not done this reveals something usually overlooked about the nature of the anti-censorship arms race. The situation is frequently cast as a battle between the evil geniuses who run the government filters and the good geniuses who write the software to get around the filters, while the grateful citizens of the censored country are the beneficiaries. But if the government censors haven't even done some simple experiments like this in order to block UltraSurf, they must not think it's a high priority to stop the program from working. This in turn suggests that the number of people using UltraSurf in a country like China, while large in absolute numbers, don't constitute a large enough proportion of the population to worry the government. Presumably either the ideas leaking in through an unfiltered Internet are not reaching a large enough proportion of the population, or the ideas are not expected to take hold in enough people's minds to reach a tipping point that causes a problem for the ruling party.

It's not that the Chinese censors don't care about controlling the Internet and the effect that it has on their citizens' thinking. The Chinese have reported fielded a droid army of about 50,000 cubicle drones to help fight Internet propaganda battles, such as drowning out anti-government posts on public forums. Why would they spend such enormous efforts to generate forum posts, but not make the effort to find and block all UltraSurf IP addresses? Because the battlefront is about defaults. If the user tries to access a site and it's blocked, then only a tiny proportion will make a significant effort to circumvent the block. (The exception would be when an extremely popular site like YouTube is blocked; operators of Web proxy sites report that during these periods, they get so much traffic from Chinese users trying to view YouTube videos, that the servers often crash.) Similarly, if users see that 90% of the posts on a given forum are on one side of the issue, then they're more likely to think that's the majority viewpoint (whether they agree with it or not). Hence the usefulness of the army of 50,000 to invade forum threads. Defaults matter; would Internet Explorer have ever displaced Netscape's browser (kids, ask your parents) if it hadn't been the default browser in all versions of Windows?

So the moral for any would-be designers of new anti-Internet-censorship tools, is not to worry too much about whether there's a theoretical way (or even a practical way) that the censors could shut the tool down. UltraSurf became enormously popular without solving that problem, and perhaps another tool could as well.

Several readers made sure we know about the possible meteorite that crashed into a field in northern Latvia yesterday. It left a crater 9m across and 3m deep according to the AP; 15m x 5m according to AFP; or 20m x 10m according to CNN. Sky News reporting includes a video recorded while approaching the smoking crater on foot; something is burning in its center. Xinhua has a brief mention with a good portrait of the crater in daylight, with people standing on its rim for perspective. Various outlets report that local authorities tested for radiation and found levels to be normal. Some quote an expert who estimates that, if it was a meteorite, it was probably around 1m in diameter when it hit. Update 16:40 GMT by SM: As many readers have pointed out, this has been declared a hoax.
Update: 10/27 16:41 GMT by KD : Swedish mobile phone operator Tele2 has now fessed up to pulling off the hoax.

reifman writes "For tax purposes, Microsoft reports that it's earned its estimated $143 billion in software licensing revenue in Nevada, where there is no licensing tax, as we discussed a few weeks ago. However, for legal purposes, Microsoft relies on Washington law and its underfunded courts to defend its contracts as it did in Microsoft Licensing GP vs. TSR Silicon. Application of common legal doctrines such as nexus, the step doctrine, and alter ego theory may lead to findings that Microsoft owes the state more than $1 billion in taxes, interest, and penalties."

lunatick writes "The controversial mandatory swine flu vaccine for health care workers in NY has been suspended. While the reason for the suspension was stated as a shortage of the vaccine, a connection was found showing state Health Commissioner Richard F. Daines, M.D. and/or his wife may directly profit from the sale of the vaccine. Within hours of that connection being questioned on a radio show and the podcast being distributed, the announcement was made suspending the order. The health care community of NYS is petitioning the State Attorney general to investigate the connection."

Zaurus writes "Apple has replaced its ZFS project page with a notice that 'The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly.' Apple originally touted ZFS as a feature that would be available in Snow Leopard Server. A few months before release, all mention of ZFS was removed from the Apple web site and literature, and ZFS was notably absent from Snow Leopard Server at launch. Despite repeated attempts to get clarification about their plans from ZFS, Apple has not made any official statement regarding the matter. A zfs-macos Google group has been set up for members of Apple's zfs-discuss mailing list to migrate to, as many people had started using the unfinished ZFS port already. The call is out for developers who can continue the forked project." Daring Fireball suggests that Apple's decision could have been motivated by NetApp's patent lawsuit over ZFS.

An anonymous reader writes "A neural implant that connects to muscle-stimulating electrodes has given monkeys the ability to grasp a ball and drop it into a hole even though the monkey's arm has been anesthetized. The approach is another step towards 'rewiring' the brains and limbs of paralyzed patients. The research, presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference in Chicago this week, uses a technique called functional electrical stimulation (FES), in which implanted electrodes deliver electrical current to trigger muscle contractions, providing a way to reconnect this loop."

1sockchuck writes "As more networks prepare for the transition to IPv6, we're seeing the first peering disputes (sometimes known as 'Internet partitions') involving IPv6 connectivity. The dispute involves Cogent, which has previously been involved in high-profile IPv4 peering spats with Sprint, Level 3 and Telia. Hurricane Electric, which has been an early adopter on IPv6, says Cogent won't peer with it over IPv6. Hurricane has extended an olive branch by baking a cake bearing a message of outreach for Cogent."

1sockchuck writes "As more networks prepare for the transition to IPv6, we're seeing the first peering disputes (sometimes known as 'Internet partitions') involving IPv6 connectivity. The dispute involves Cogent, which has previously been involved in high-profile IPv4 peering spats with Sprint, Level 3 and Telia. Hurricane Electric, which has been an early adopter on IPv6, says Cogent won't peer with it over IPv6. Hurricane has extended an olive branch by baking a cake bearing a message of outreach for Cogent."

1sockchuck writes "As more networks prepare for the transition to IPv6, we're seeing the first peering disputes (sometimes known as 'Internet partitions') involving IPv6 connectivity. The dispute involves Cogent, which has previously been involved in high-profile IPv4 peering spats with Sprint, Level 3 and Telia. Hurricane Electric, which has been an early adopter on IPv6, says Cogent won't peer with it over IPv6. Hurricane has extended an olive branch by baking a cake bearing a message of outreach for Cogent."

carstene writes "The NASA Centennial Challenge Powered Beaming competition, to develop technology for uses such as a space elevator, or to power a rover in a shadowed crater on the moon, was delayed indefinitely due to trouble setting up the kilometer-high race track. It has now had the kinks worked out and is rescheduled for the week of November 2nd. The competition involves using a high-power laser to beam power to a robot that climbs a kilometer-high cable attached to a helicopter. The competition was previously covered on Slashdot."

eldavojohn writes "If you live in the EU, you probably enjoy low broadband costs. If you live in Finland, it's even a legal right. If you live in the US, you probably pay a moderate cost. But if you live in the developing world, a UNCTAD report paints your picture pretty grim. Ridiculously high bandwidth costs are inhibiting developing nations from enjoying productive use of the internet — like online banking and market tools."

We've been talking a lot lately about flu vaccines. Now an anonymous reader sends us to a Technology Review piece on two human trials involving so-called virus-like particle vaccines, which promise to be much faster to churn out than traditional vaccines. (Here's a single-page version but without the useful illustration.) VLP vaccines use a protein shell, grown in either plant or insect cells, that look just like real viruses to the body's immune system but that contain no influenza RNA genetic material. A company called Medicago grows its VLPs in transgenic tobacco plants, while another called Novavax uses "immortalized" cells taken from caterpillars. Providing they pass safety muster, both techniques should be able to produce an influenza vaccine more quickly than current methods, using just the DNA of the virus.

We've been talking a lot lately about flu vaccines. Now an anonymous reader sends us to a Technology Review piece on two human trials involving so-called virus-like particle vaccines, which promise to be much faster to churn out than traditional vaccines. (Here's a single-page version but without the useful illustration.) VLP vaccines use a protein shell, grown in either plant or insect cells, that look just like real viruses to the body's immune system but that contain no influenza RNA genetic material. A company called Medicago grows its VLPs in transgenic tobacco plants, while another called Novavax uses "immortalized" cells taken from caterpillars. Providing they pass safety muster, both techniques should be able to produce an influenza vaccine more quickly than current methods, using just the DNA of the virus.

jjohn24680 passes along word that a federal judge has thrown out a local sheriff's lawsuit accusing the online classified group Craigslist of facilitating prostitution. We discussed the case when it was filed back in March. Here is the decision (PDF). "As was pretty clear at the time, Craigslist is the service provider and is quite obviously protected by Section 230 immunity. ... Even after all of this was clearly explained to Sheriff Dart, he still insisted that his lawsuit made sense. It looks like the court system, however, does not agree. As expected, the case has been dismissed on Section 230 grounds."

ceswiedler writes "The FCC has begun crafting rules for network neutrality. The full proposal hasn't been released yet, but according to their press release (warning, Microsoft Word document) carriers would not be allowed to 'prevent users from sending or receiving the lawful content,' 'running lawful applications,' or 'connecting and using ... lawful devices that do not harm the network.' There will be a three-month period for comments beginning January 14, followed by 2 months for replies, after which the FCC will issue its final guidelines." Reader Adrian Lopez notes that US Senator and former presidential candidate John McCain has introduced legislation that "would keep the FCC from enacting rules prohibiting broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing Internet content and applications." McCain called the proposed net neutrality rules a "government takeover" of the Internet.
Update: 10/24 16:32 GMT by KD : jamie found a Reuters story reporting that the Sunlight Foundation has revealed John McCain to be Congress's biggest recipient of telco money over the last two years — "a total of $894,379..., more than twice the amount taken by the next-largest beneficiary, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev."

An anonymous reader writes "After months of prodding by developers, HTC has finally released the long-requested Android source code for the HTC Hero. This follows up on a recent report on Slashdot concerning device manufacturer HTC's perceived stonewalling over releasing source code for the device after repeated attempts to initially obtain source were met with vague responses."

1sockchuck writes "The risks and rewards of raising the temperature in the data center were debated last week in several new studies based on real-world testing in Silicon Valley facilities. The verdict: companies can indeed save big money on power costs by running warmer. Cisco Systems expects to save $2 million a year by raising the temperature in its San Jose research labs. But nudge the thermostat too high, and the energy savings can evaporate in a flurry of server fan activity. The new studies added some practical guidance on a trend that has become a hot topic as companies focus on rising power bills in the data center."

Foofoobar writes "Due to a strike with the UK's postal system, people in Great Britain are getting copies of Windows 7 early and have already posted their experiences about the install process. Some have an easy time but others post installs taking 3 hours including Windows asking them to remove iTunes and Google toolbar prior to installation." The article indicates that many of these early users, though, are having better luck.

kkleiner writes "Bojan Nemec from the Jozef Stefan Institute in Slovenia recently presented his skiing robot at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). The robot won't be winning skiing records anytime soon and its usefulness as a ski instructor or in any other capacity seems quite a ways off. Nonetheless, the videos of this robot taking a ride down the ski slopes are well worth watching. In case you are wondering, this is a completely different robot than the one Slashdot covered earlier."

eldavojohn writes "A hundred thousand elderly Californians (average age 65) will be gene sequenced by the state using samples of their saliva. This will be the first time such a large group has had their genes sequenced, and it is hoped to be a goldmine for genetic maladies — from cardiovascular diseases to diabetes to even the diseases associated with aging. Kaiser Permanente patients will be involved, and they are aiming to have half a million samples ready by 2013. Let's hope that they got permission from the patients' doctors first."

ozmanjusri writes with an update to a story we discussed a few days ago about a $200 million patent victory by CSIRO, Australia's governmental science research body. The organization has now turned around and reinvested $150 million of the proceeds into the science and industry endowment fund, which has already established three grants: "$12 million for two wireless research projects and $7.5 million for up to 120 fellowships and scholarships." CSIRO boss Megan Clark said, "It's very important that when you have a success like this, you reinvest it back into the wellspring. It's really about supporting areas that might need a helping hand in some of the frontier areas and research that actually tackles the national challenges."

2D Boy, the independent game studio behind World of Goo, recently celebrated the game's one-year anniversary by offering it at whatever price buyers cared to pay. They've now released some sales statistics about how people responded to the opportunity. The average price during the sale was $2.03; the game normally retails for $20. According to a survey of why people paid what they did, 22.4% said it was all they could afford at the time, and 12.4% said they already owned World of Goo and were buying it for a different platform. (Yes, there is a Linux version.) Over 57,000 people took advantage of the offer, which was enough for 2D Boy to term it "a huge success." Interestingly, they also saw a significant increase in sales through Steam, and a smaller increase through Wiiware. They've decided to extend the experiment until October 25th.

Following up our earlier discussion of the theory that the Higgs boson might time-travel to avoid being found, reader gpronger notes an interview with MIT (and LHC) physicist Steven Nahn, in which he comments on Nielsen and Ninomiya's unlikely-sounding theory. "The premise is fairly crazy, but many things in physics are constructed that way... The difference here is that... previous 'crazy' ideas gave consequences that were clearly testable and attestable to the new nature of the theory, in an objective manner, and involved the behavior of inanimate objects (i.e., not humans). However, in this case, the consequences seem quite contrived... Exactly in line with their argument, I could say that Nature abhors the Chicago Cubs, such that the theory which describes the evolution of our universe prescribed Steve Bartman to interfere on October 14, 2003, extending the 'bad luck' of the Cubbies."

ExRex writes "A team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has observed the production of superheavy element 114, confirming the results of researchers at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia. Those researchers first reported producing element 114 in 1999. Such independent verification is important, particularly given the evidence of fabricated results for other superheavy elements. If you're a subscriber to Physical Review Letters, you can download the full article."

Toe, The writes "Today Apple announced several new hardware offerings, including a new Mac mini, their (almost-literally) pint-sized desktop computer. In a bizarre twist, they are now also offering a Mac mini with Mac OS X Server bundled in, along with a two hard drives somehow stuffed into the tiny package. Undoubtedly, many in the IT community will scoff at the thought of calling such a device a 'server.' However, with the robust capabilities of Snow Leopard Server (a true, if highly GUI-fied, UNIX server), it seems likely to find a niche in small businesses and even enthusiasts' homes. The almost completely guided setup process means that people can set up relatively sophisticated services without the assistance of someone who actually knows what they are doing. What the results will be in terms of security, etc. will be... interesting to watch as they develop." El Reg has a good roundup article of the many announcements; the multi-touch Magic Mouse is right up there on the techno-lust-inspiration scale.

GeekZilla sends coverage from Wired's Gadget Lab on the Nook, Barnes & Noble's first e-book reader. "Sleek, stylish and runs the Android OS. What's not to like about Barnes and Noble's new e-book reader? Despite the odd name, the Nook looks like an eBook reader that would actually be a worthwhile investment. Best feature? The ability to loan e-books you have downloaded to other Nook owners. The reader, named the 'Nook,' looks a lot like Amazon's white plastic e-book, only instead of the chiclet-keyboard there is a color multi-touch screen, to be used as both a keyboard or to browse books, cover-flow style. The machine runs Google's Android OS, will have wireless capability from an unspecified carrier, and comes in at the same $260 as the now rather old-fashioned-looking Kindle." Here is the B&N Nook site, which is still not visible on their front page and has a few non-working links. (Nook.com isn't set up yet.) Their comparison page takes dead aim at the Kindle. Among the advantages in the Nook's column: Wi-Fi, expandable memory via microSD, MP3 player, and PDF compatibility. (But remember the cautionary note B&N struck six years back when they got out of the e-book business.)

bonch writes "Mozilla previously blocked the Firefox addons Microsoft included with .NET, citing security concerns. After talking with Microsoft, they have now unblocked the .NET Framework Assistant addon and are working on a way for enterprise users to unblock the Windows Presentation Foundation addon as well."

HKcastaway writes "Amiga Inc and Hyperion Entertainment announced a settlement over ownership and licensing over AmigaOS 4.0 and future versions. Since the bankruptcy of Commodore, Amiga's history has been littered with lawsuits that have affected the development of Amiga hardware and software. Having a lawsuit-free OS probably will help a great deal to the continuity and recovery of the Amiga heritage. Hyperion also provides AmigaOS SDKs for developers.'

Dan Jones writes "As recently discussed here, Linux sound development has come under fire for being overly complex and, more specifically, PulseAudio has been criticized for not being a 'good idea.' In a lengthy interview, PulseAudio creator Lennart Poettering has responded to the many critics of the new-generation sound server and says such complaints and criticisms about PulseAudio in some Internet forums are not really shared by the vast majority of technical people. While Poettering admits PulseAudio itself is not bug-free, he believes the majority of issues are being triggered by misbehaving drivers or applications."

Last year we discussed the work of Richard Lenski, who has been breeding E. coli for 21 years in a laboratory in Michigan. Then, the news was that Lenski's lab had caught direct, reproducible evidence of a genetic mutation with functional consequences for an organism. Now Lenski's lab has published in Nature a major study comparing adaptive and random genetic changes in 40,000 generations of E. coli (abstract here). "Early changes in the bacteria appeared to be largely adaptive, helping them be more successful in their environment. 'The genome was evolving along at a surprisingly constant rate, even as the adaptation of the bacteria slowed down,' [Lenski] noted. 'But then suddenly the mutation rate jumped way up, and a new dynamic relationship was established.' By generation 20,000, for example, the group found that some 45 genetic mutations had occurred, but 6,000 generations later a genetic mutation in the metabolism arose and sparked a rapid increase in the number of mutations so that by generation 40,000, some 653 mutations had occurred. Unlike the earlier changes, many of these later mutations appeared to be more random and neutral. The long-awaited findings show that calculating rates and types of evolutionary change may be even more difficult to do without a rich data set."

ewsnow writes "The Focus Fusion Society reports that the scientists and engineers at Lawrenceville Plasma Physics have finally built an operational Dense Plasma Focus device. While still at less than half power, they were able to achieve a pinch on their device. The small company that Eric Lerner started recently gathered enough funding to start a two-year study on the validity of his theory regarding fusion-inducing plasmoids. If the theory holds, the device will produce more electricity than it consumes. In contrast to the billions of dollars spent on Tokamak fusion (think ITER), LPP is conducting their research on a budget around a million dollars. Yet, if it works, it will provide nuclear fusion with much simpler equipment and much less cost. Eric Lerner and Focus Fusion have been discussed on Slashdot before."

ewsnow writes "The Focus Fusion Society reports that the scientists and engineers at Lawrenceville Plasma Physics have finally built an operational Dense Plasma Focus device. While still at less than half power, they were able to achieve a pinch on their device. The small company that Eric Lerner started recently gathered enough funding to start a two-year study on the validity of his theory regarding fusion-inducing plasmoids. If the theory holds, the device will produce more electricity than it consumes. In contrast to the billions of dollars spent on Tokamak fusion (think ITER), LPP is conducting their research on a budget around a million dollars. Yet, if it works, it will provide nuclear fusion with much simpler equipment and much less cost. Eric Lerner and Focus Fusion have been discussed on Slashdot before."

ewsnow writes "The Focus Fusion Society reports that the scientists and engineers at Lawrenceville Plasma Physics have finally built an operational Dense Plasma Focus device. While still at less than half power, they were able to achieve a pinch on their device. The small company that Eric Lerner started recently gathered enough funding to start a two-year study on the validity of his theory regarding fusion-inducing plasmoids. If the theory holds, the device will produce more electricity than it consumes. In contrast to the billions of dollars spent on Tokamak fusion (think ITER), LPP is conducting their research on a budget around a million dollars. Yet, if it works, it will provide nuclear fusion with much simpler equipment and much less cost. Eric Lerner and Focus Fusion have been discussed on Slashdot before."