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Antarctica has become the best-mapped continent on Earth with a new high-resolution terrain map showing the ice-covered landmass in unprecedented detail. From a report: According to the scientists at Ohio State University and the University of Minnesota who created the imagery, Antarctica is now the best-mapped continent on Earth. The Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica (REMA) was constructed using hundreds of thousands of satellite images taken between 2009 and 2017, Earther reports. A supercomputer assembled the massive amounts of data, including the elevation of the land over time, and created REMA, an immensely detailed topographical map, with a file size over 150 terabytes. The new map has a resolution of 2 to 8 meters, compared to the usual 1,000 meters, says an Ohio State press release. According to The New York Times, the detail of this new map is the equivalent of being able to see down to a car, or smaller, when before you could only see the whole of Central Park. Scientists now know the elevation of every point of Antarctica, with an error margin of just a few feet.

Robotron23 writes: Research published by Orb Media, a nonprofit journalism group, has revealed that microplastics have contaminated high proportions of drinking water and bottled water. Samples from the United States tested positive in 94% of instances, while Europe's contamination averages around 72%. Tests were undertaken at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, with lead researcher Dr. Anne Marie Mahon noting the risk of plastics carrying bacteria, and commenting: "In terms of fibers, the diameter is 10 microns across and it would be very unusual to find that level of filtration in our drinking water systems." As for the culprit, the report mentions the atmosphere as one obvious source, "with fibers shed by the everyday wear and tear of clothes and carpets." Another potential source is tumble dryers, "with almost 80% of U.S. households having dryers that usually vent to the open air." Overall, the investigation by Orb Media found that 83% of the samples were contaminated with plastic fibers.

rootmon writes: Information Security Professional David Levin was arrested 3 months after reporting un-patched SQL injection vulnerabilities in the Lee County, Florida Elections Office run by Sharon Harrington, the Lee County Supervisor of Elections. Harrington's office has been in the news before for voting systems problems (for example in during the 2012 election, 35 districts in Lee County had to remain open 3 hours past the closing of polls due to long lines and equipment issues, wasting $800,000 to $1.6 million of taxpayer money on incompatible iPads for which her office is facing an audit. Rather than fixing the issues in their systems, they chose to charge the whistleblower with three third-degree felonies. The News Press also has several related interviews.

HughPickens.com writes: Researchers Halfaker, Geiger, Morgan, and Riedl have a new paper on the topic of open collaboration systems about how Wikipedia's reaction to its popularity is causing its decline. From the Abstract: "Open collaboration systems like Wikipedia need to maintain a pool of volunteer contributors in order to remain relevant. Wikipedia was created through a tremendous number of contributions by millions of contributors. However, recent research has shown that the number of active contributors in Wikipedia has been declining steadily for years, and suggests that a sharp decline in the retention of newcomers is the cause. This paper presents data that show that several changes the Wikipedia community made to manage quality and consistency in the face of a massive growth in participation have ironically crippled the very growth they were designed to manage. Specifically, the restrictiveness of the encyclopedia's primary quality control mechanism and the algorithmic tools used to reject contributions are implicated as key causes of decreased newcomer retention. Further, the community's formal mechanisms for norm articulation are shown to have calcified against changes – especially changes proposed by newer editors."

An anonymous reader writes: The BBC has an article about technology's effect on concentration in the workplace. They note research finding that the average information worker's attention span has dropped significantly in only a few years. "Back in 2004 we followed American information workers around with stopwatches and timed every action. They switched their attention every three minutes on average. In 2012, we found that the time spent on one computer screen before switching to another computer screen was one minute 15 seconds. By the summer of 2014 it was an average of 59.5 seconds." Many groups are now researching ways to keep people in states of focus and concentration. An app ecosystem is popping up to support that as well, from activity timing techniques to background noise that minimizes distractions. Recent studies are even showing that walking slowly on a treadmill while you work can have positive effects on focus and productivity. What tricks do you use to keep yourself on task?

symbolset writes in with the latest about an ebola outbreak spreading across West Africa. The World Health Organization (WHO) continues to monitor the evolution of the Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea. The current epidemic trend of EVD outbreak in Sierra Leone and Liberia remains serious, with 67 new cases and 19 deaths reported July 15-17, 2014. These include suspect, probable, and laboratory-confirmed cases. The EVD outbreak in Guinea continues to show a declining trend, with no new cases reported during this period. Critical analyses and review of the current outbreak response is being undertaken to inform the process of developing prioritized national operational plans. Effective implementation of the prioritized plans will be vital in reversing the current trend of EVD outbreak, especially in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

An anonymous reader writes Researchers have discovered that emperor penguins may not be faithful to their previous nesting locations, as previously thought. Scientists have long thought that emperor penguins were philopatric, returning to the same location to nest each year. However, a new research study showed that the penguins may be behaving in ways that allow them to adapt to their changing environment. Lead author Michelle LaRue said,"Our research showing that colonies seem to appear and disappear throughout the years challenges behaviors we thought we understood about emperor penguins. If we assume that these birds come back to the same locations every year, without fail, these new colonies we see on satellite images wouldn't make any sense. These birds didn't just appear out of thin air—they had to have come from somewhere else. This suggests that emperor penguins move among colonies. That means we need to revisit how we interpret population changes and the causes of those changes."

theodp writes "Conceding that he hadn't actually played with one, Apple CEO Tim Cook told Wall Street that Microsoft's Surface tablet is 'a fairly compromised, confusing product' in the company's 4Q earnings call. Cook joked, 'I supposed you could design a car that flies and floats, but it wouldn't do those things very well.' In Apple's 2Q earnings call, Cook also mocked the idea of touch on a laptop or desktop, quipping, 'You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going be pleasing to the user.' Cook added, 'We've done tons of user testing on this, and it turns out it doesn't work. Touch surfaces don't want to be vertical.' So, is Cook just pulling a page from Steve Jobs' people-don't-read-anymore playbook, or is he unaware that children happily used vertical touch screens forty years ago on UIUC's PLATO System (more PLATO History)?"

McGruber writes with news of a ruling in a copyright case brought against Georgia State by several publishers over the university's electronic reserve system: "The Atlanta Journal Constitution is reporting that a federal judge has ruled in favor of Georgia State University on 69 of 74 copyright claims filed by Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and SAGE Publications. In a 350-page ruling, Senior U.S. District Judge Orinda Evans found that 'fair use protected a Georgia State University professor's decision to allow students to access an excerpt online through the university's Electronic Reserves System.' While the 69 of the 74 claims were rejected, the judge also found that five violations did occur 'when the publisher lost money because a professor had provided free electronic access to selected chapters in textbooks.' SAGE Publications prevailed on four of these five claims, while Oxford University Press won the fifth claim. Cambridge University Press lost all its claims." From Inside Higher Ed: "And the judge also rejected the publishers' ideas about how to regulate e-reserves — ideas that many academic librarians said would be unworkable. At the same time, however, the judge imposed a strict limit of 10 percent on the volume of a book that may be covered by fair use (a proportion that would cover much, but by no means all, of what was in e-reserves at Georgia State, and probably at many other colleges). And the judge ruled that publishers may have more claims against college and university e-reserves if the publishers offer convenient, reasonably priced systems for getting permission (at a price) to use book excerpts online. The lack of such systems today favored Georgia State, but librarians who were anxiously going through the decision were speculating that some publishers might be prompted now to create such systems, and to charge as much as the courts would permit."

New submitter Durinia writes "Minnesota Public Radio is running a story about the University of Minnesota's Open Textbooks project. The goal of the project is to solicit reviews of college-level open source textbooks and collect those that pass muster onto their website. The project will focus first on high-volume introductory classes such as those for Math and Biology, because as David Ernst, director of the project, states in the interview: 'You know the world doesn't need another $150 Algebra One book. Algebra One hasn't changed for centuries, probably.'" Requirements for inclusion include: Open licensing (Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike), complete content (no glorified collections of lecture notes), applicability outside of the author's institution, and print availability.

New submitter Durinia writes "Minnesota Public Radio is running a story about the University of Minnesota's Open Textbooks project. The goal of the project is to solicit reviews of college-level open source textbooks and collect those that pass muster onto their website. The project will focus first on high-volume introductory classes such as those for Math and Biology, because as David Ernst, director of the project, states in the interview: 'You know the world doesn't need another $150 Algebra One book. Algebra One hasn't changed for centuries, probably.'" Requirements for inclusion include: Open licensing (Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike), complete content (no glorified collections of lecture notes), applicability outside of the author's institution, and print availability.

alphadogg writes "GSM cellular networks leak enough location data to give third-parties secret access to cellphone users' whereabouts, according to new University of Minnesota research. 'We have shown that there is enough information leaking from the lower layers of the GSM communication stack to enable an attacker to perform location tests on a victim's device. We have shown that those tests can be performed silently without a user being aware by aborting PSTN calls before they complete,' write the authors, from the College of Science and Engineering, in a paper titled 'Location Leaks on the GSM Air Interface' (Pdf). The researchers are working with carriers and equipment makers, including AT&T and Nokia, to address the security issues."

rudy_wayne writes "We know you can take down Web sites with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. We know that a government, like Egypt's, can shut down an entire country's Internet access. And, we thought we knew that you can't take down the entire Internet. It turns out we could be wrong. In a report from New Scientist, Max Schuchard, a computer science graduate student, and his buddies claim they've found a way to launch DDoS attacks on Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) network routers that could crash the Internet."

dptalia notes the recent publication in Science of research demonstrating a way to use hot electrons in solar cells, resulting in an overall energy conversion efficiency of 66%. Here is the abstract in Science; access to the full article requires a subscription. "A team of University of Minnesota-led researchers has cleared a major hurdle in the drive to build solar cells with potential efficiencies up to twice as high as current levels, which rarely exceed 30 percent. ... Tisdale and his colleagues demonstrated that quantum dots — made not of silicon but of another semiconductor called lead selenide — could indeed be made to surrender their 'hot' electrons before they cooled. The electrons were pulled away by titanium dioxide, another common inexpensive and abundant semiconductor material that behaves like a wire."

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In Capitol Records v. Thomas-Rasset, the judge has denied the defendant's motion to suppress the MediaSentry evidence for illegality, holding that MediaSentry's conduct did not violate any of the three laws cited by the defendant. The judge also dismissed most of the RIAA's objections to testimony by the defendant's expert, Prof. Yongdae Kim, but did sustain some of them. In his 27-page decision (PDF), Judge Davis ruled that Prof. Kim could testify about the 'possible scenarios,' but could not opine as to what he thinks 'probably' occurred. The court also ruled that, 'given the evidence that there is no wireless router involved in this case, the Court excludes Kim's opinion that it is possible that someone could have spoofed or hijacked Defendant's Internet account through an unprotected wireless access point. Similarly, because Kim explicitly testified that this case does not involve any "black IP space," or any "temporarily unused" IP space ...., he is not permitted to opine at trial that hijacking of black IP space or temporary unused IP is a possible explanation in this case.' Dr. Kim was also precluded from testifying as to whether song files were conspicuously placed in a shared files folder or were wilfully offered for distribution. The judge also precluded him from testifying about Kazaa's functioning, but it was unclear to me what the judge was precluding him from saying, because the offered testimony seemed to relate only to the question of whether the Kazaa-reported IP address precluded the possibility of the device having been run behind a NAT device."

KitB sends in a story in the Salt Lake Tribune that tells of a Web-based scam, resembling some used by Nigerian gangs, that snared the state of Utah. $2.5M was sent to a bank account in Texas before the bank raised a question and then froze $1.8M in the account. "Thieves apparently used a Nigerian-based scam to steal $2.5 million from the Utah treasury, covering their tracks by using intermediaries and a church address. A Salt Lake Tribune review of the names listed in a search warrant as receiving or transferring money [found] names of African origin or connections to that continent. Michael Kessler, ... a forensic accounting [investigator] in New York City, said the thieves appear to have used a simple scam that originated in Nigeria about five years ago. The Utah theft is the first time he's seen a government victimized. 'Their IT people should have known better,' Kessler said after reviewing a copy of the search warrant Thursday. 'It sounds like any kid could have done this.'"

eldavojohn writes "There's an interesting post over at the Kernel Trap that focuses on a man's attempt to find out how many one-time contributors Linux averages per release. Although imperfect due to some obvious unavoidable flaws, he got a few dirty numbers of 'never seen from agains' in the commits from patches 2.6.11 through 2.6.25 and the numbers are: {63, 148, 128, 92, 96, 122, 137, 140, 135, 95, 136, 153, 179, 179, 304}. This makes sense as another reader, Greg KH, pointed out that the distribution curve is tilted towards one-hit contributions, 'the distribution of all of our users are: 50% only contributed 1 patch; 25% contributed 2; 12% contributed 3; 6% contributed 4 and so on ...'"

eldavojohn writes "Ars is running a brief article that looks at stances from Chuck Fish of McCain's campaign and Daniel Weitzner from Obama's in regards to technical issues that may cause us geeks to vote one way or the other. From openness vs. bandwidth in the net neutrality issue to those pesky National Security Letters, there's some key differences that just might play at least a small part in your vote. You may also remember our discussions on who is best for geeks."

eldavojohn writes "Wired is running an informative article on Paypal Founder Peter Thiel's investment in seasteading. There's a great graphic indicating how the spar design helps platforms weather rough seas with a ballast. There's a lot more than just Thiel throwing the half million towards this and they hope to pitch this to San Fransisco for a bay pilot. Ocean colonies can be both liberating and also downright human-rights-lacking scary."

eldavojohn writes "For the processor geeks here, Jon Stokes has a thoughtful article up at Ars Technica analyzing RISC vs. CISC in mobile phones (Wikipedia on Reduced Instruction Set Computers and Complex Instruction Set Computers). He wraps it up with two questions: 'How much is the legacy x86 code base really worth for mobile and ultramobile devices? The consensus seems to be "not much," and I vacillate on this question quite a bit. This question merits an entire article of its own, though,' and 'Will Intel retain its process leadership vs. foundries like TSMC, which are rapidly catching up to it in their timetables for process transitions? ARM, MIPS, and other players in the mobile device space that I haven't mentioned, like NVIDIA, AMD/ATI, VIA, and PowerVR, all depend on these foundries to get their chips to market, so being one process node behind hurts them. But if these RISC and mobile graphics products can compete with Intel's offerings on feature size, then that will neutralize Intel's considerable process advantage.'"

eldavojohn writes "Although we don't know what they were after due to the settlement, a gag order was just released that kept Internet Archive member Brewster Kahle quiet. The FBI had issued a national security letter to them under the Patriot Act. Kahle fought it. Hard. The EFF came to the aid of his lawyers and what resulted was one of the only three times an NSL has been challenged: all three have been rescinded. The FBI agreed to open some of the court files now for it to be public. The ACLU added, 'That makes you wonder about the the hundreds of thousands of NSLs that haven't been challenged.'"

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "By now, we've all heard of the 'coming exaflood' that will drown the ISPs in data and smite the wicked P2P users. Fortunately, the 'exaflood' is unlikely to be a disaster. Internet traffic growth is falling year-over-year, and there's plenty of core bandwidth — now handling about an exabyte a month in fact — but the last mile is still slow. So there's a reason that Comcast & co. are worried about losing to P2P, but the Internet itself isn't likely to suffer a meltdown any time soon. And there's plenty of data to counter anyone who says otherwise."

vlado4 writes "The New York Times has up an article on the amount of space junk in Earth Orbit. According to NASA officials, the amount of stuff we've put into LEO is at critical levels. Additionally they have great graphics of the nearly 1000 new pieces resulting from testing the new Chinese anti-satellite weapon, as well as the damage to Hubble's solar array. The litter is now so bad that, even if space-faring nations refrained from further interference, collisions would continue to create more clutter just above our atmosphere. Space debris appear to be a difficult problem to deal with and may hinder future space exploration."

inputsprocket asks: "Having gotten into a project that involves doing some geo-statistic data mining analysis on Apache log files, I couldn't believe how there seems to be such a large chasm, in open source's vast library, for such a powerful analytical tool. Unless I'm wrong, then there is no such open source project available for *nix variants. There appears to be a great deal of brand software (heh — only for Windows off-site analysis though), yet there is are great open source tools for generic mapping tools (GMTs). The available GMTs seem to be overkill for mapping of weblogs and require a lot of in-house programming to map IP addresses to cartographic data using free geo-location databases. The closest I found was Palentir. Does one really have to rely on the powerful needs of Map Server, MapTools, Carto Web, or Map Builder to draw simple maps with statistics on web usage, given the extra programming needs required to do this? "To see what is possible, have a look at DeepMetrix's LiveStats.XSP — a commercial option, which isn't a problem. It's just a shame that it's only for Windows and for of-site browsing.

Somebody, please tell me there's more to open source geolocation of web traffic than Analog."

BcNexus writes "According to the Associated Press, a California judge has ruled that a lawsuit brought against the Target Corporation may proceed under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The catch here is that the suit, leveled by the National Federation of the Blind, concerns the design of Target's website. Could this set a precedent and subsequent flood of lawsuits against websites? What if another design is not tractable?" From the article: "'What this means is that any place of business that provides services, such as the opportunity to buy products on a website, is now, a place of accommodation and therefore falls under the ADA,' said Kathy Wahlbin, Mindshare's Director of User Experience and expert on accessibility. 'The good news is that being compliant is not difficult nor is it expensive. And it provides the additional benefit of making accessible web sites easier for search engines to find and prioritize.'"

Wugger writes "The open source GIS community has been around for a long time, but has only been meeting regularly for the past three years. The most recent conference wrapped up on the weekend in Minneapolis. An excellent summary article and blog postings are available from Directions Magazine. Other attendees have also posted blogs and observations. The conference was attended by 300 people this year (up from 200 the previous year) and all the major open source GIS hackers were in attendance. In addition, some proprietary corporate players showed up to check out the scene: Autodesk, ERMapper, and ESRI, the Microsoft of the GIS industry."

pdp0x14 writes "Cnet News reports on a powerful refutation of Metcalfe's Law (that the value of a network goes up with n^2 in the number of members). The academic paper is available at Southwest Missouri State University. Basically, the thesis is that not all the links in a network are equally valuable, so Metcalfe's argument that everyone can connect to everyone (n(n-1)/2 links, roughly n^2) is irrelevant. The authors propose nlog(n) instead, a much smaller increase."

grugnog writes "The Election Incident Reporting System (EIRS) is an integrated set of tools to assist Election Protection Organizations and their members to record and react to election day incidents and irregularities. Volunteers are needed to both code the EIRS system (which is based on open source systems: AdvoKit, PHPSurveyor, MapServer, and geocoder.us) and to volunteer technical expertise to logic & accuracy testing of voting machines and poll watching through the Verified Voting Foundation."

trixie_czech writes "It's finally arrived. Go to namesys for reasons to use reiser4 as a filesystem and benchmarks. Go here to download. Enjoy!" The Namesys homepage in its current stage reminds me of a cross between The Secret Guide to Computers and the GNU Manifesto -- which is to say, there is a lot to read here, not just a bullet-pointed feature list.

Joey Patterson writes "CNET is reporting that Velvet Revolver's new album, 'Contraband', which is protected with SunnComm's anti-copying technology, has topped the U.S. album charts. The SunnComm and BMG execs quoted in the article say that they're pleased with the apparent consumer acceptance of the anti-piracy technology, but they have been hearing questions about how people can get the copy-blocked songs from the CD onto an iPod."

ekr writes "A lot of effort goes into finding vulnerabilities in software, but there's no real evidence that it actually improves security. I've been trying to study this problem and the results (pdf) aren't very encouraging. It doesn't look like we're making much of a dent in the overall number of vulnerabilities in the software we use. The paper was presented at the Workshop on Economics and Information Security 2004 and the slides can be found here (pdf)."

ekr writes "A lot of effort goes into finding vulnerabilities in software, but there's no real evidence that it actually improves security. I've been trying to study this problem and the results (pdf) aren't very encouraging. It doesn't look like we're making much of a dent in the overall number of vulnerabilities in the software we use. The paper was presented at the Workshop on Economics and Information Security 2004 and the slides can be found here (pdf)."

An anonymous reader writes "Seems many of the feats of SpiderMan, Superman and other superheroes obey the basic requirements of physics. So says a University of Minnesota physicist who uses nothing but comics to teach the subject. 'Comic books get their science right more often than one would expect ... I was able to find examples in superhero comic books of the correct descriptions of basic physical principles for a wide range of topics, including classical mechanics, electricity and magnetism, and even quantum physics.' Especially cool: Why Krypton *had* to explode."

Blaine Garrett asks: "I run a small online art community called the Art Attack. A lot of my members that sign up are not getting their welcome emails and newsletters. Most often, I cannot even directly email the members. Services such as hotmail automatically put email from my server in the junk mail folder. A while back someone was using the server to bounce spam. I am not sure if this is the direct cause, or not. Is there away to get off the spammer lists of these big services? Additionally, I have been informed that, since the site contains art depicting nudity, ISPs have been blocking the IP of my server. This is rather annoying since I also provide web hosting for other sites on the server. I'm losing customers and hits. Is there a way around this?" With respect to the Spam lists, this article might be helpful, but it may be harder to get the server removed, considering it has already been marked as an open relay. It will be harder to get your server out of ISP Filters, however. One man's "art" can always become another man's "porn", and convincing them otherwise will be difficult to impossible, especially since there is nudity on the site. What suggestions do you have for Mr. Garret, in terms of helping him get his site off of as many lists as possible?

Frisky070802 writes "The Politech list recently posted a pointer to a new paper (pdf) by UMN prof Andrew Odlyzko, which compares the telecom industry to the historical transportation industry (railroad, bridges, and such). One quote, from the conclusion, is particularly interesting: '... the networking industry [has] devoted inordinate efforts to technologies such as ATM and QoS, even though there was abundant evidence these were not going to succeed. One can go further and say that essentially all the major networking initiatives of the last decade, such as ATM, QoS, RSVP, multicasting, congestion pricing, active networks, and 3G, have turned out to be duds. Furthermore, they all failed not because the technical solutions that were developed were inadequate, but because they were not what users wanted.'"

Frisky070802 writes "The Politech list recently posted a pointer to a new paper (pdf) by UMN prof Andrew Odlyzko, which compares the telecom industry to the historical transportation industry (railroad, bridges, and such). One quote, from the conclusion, is particularly interesting: '... the networking industry [has] devoted inordinate efforts to technologies such as ATM and QoS, even though there was abundant evidence these were not going to succeed. One can go further and say that essentially all the major networking initiatives of the last decade, such as ATM, QoS, RSVP, multicasting, congestion pricing, active networks, and 3G, have turned out to be duds. Furthermore, they all failed not because the technical solutions that were developed were inadequate, but because they were not what users wanted.'"

Joey Patterson writes "CNET reports that an independent software developer has released a program called MyTunes that allows people to share and download each other's MP3s on a network via iTunes." This is very much like a Mac program I saw a while back called itunesdl, which allowed one to download MP3s from friends who were sharing their playlists, exactly as MyTunes claims to do.

Mike Hicks writes "A few days ago, I heard about the FCC approving new rules for standardizing digital cable in the US. This involved using a set top box or tuner integrated into a TV along with a smart card (much like digital satellite services). Unfortunately, it looks like the standard (believed to be OpenCable) is meant to tightly control the hardware and software that can be used, probably making any open-source implementation very difficult if not impossible. I seem to be having a case of deja vu"

kinema writes "Have you ever wanted a ball of Silly Putty as big as your head? Now you can make it at home. The University of Minnesota's Chemistry Department has instructions on how to make it on their website." Isn't silly putty a copyright circumvention tool? This should be regulated before it gets out of hand.

kinema writes "Have you ever wanted a ball of Silly Putty as big as your head? Now you can make it at home. The University of Minnesota's Chemistry Department has instructions on how to make it on their website." Isn't silly putty a copyright circumvention tool? This should be regulated before it gets out of hand.

kinema writes "Have you ever wanted a ball of Silly Putty as big as your head? Now you can make it at home. The University of Minnesota's Chemistry Department has instructions on how to make it on their website." Isn't silly putty a copyright circumvention tool? This should be regulated before it gets out of hand.

An anonymous reader writes "BusinessWeek has an interesting interview with academic Andrew Odlyzko about how increased corporate spying will inevitably lead to targeted pricing and how this system can be abused." The paper (pdf) makes interesting reading. Very good insights into the reasons why businesses want to get to know you.

Joey Patterson writes "CNN reports that 'Telemarketers expanded their legal challenge to the government's do-not-call list, suing a second federal agency over the call-blocking service for consumers that the industry says will devastate business and cost as many as two million jobs.'"

Skeme writes "Have you heard of Plan 9 or Reiser4 but don't know much about them? Are you curious about the improvements free software is making to its filesystems in general? Read my summary of the current developments in the filesystem: namely, what improvements we can expect (a lot), and what Linux and the BSDs can do to improve on the filesystem."

Skeme writes "Have you heard of Plan 9 or Reiser4 but don't know much about them? Are you curious about the improvements free software is making to its filesystems in general? Read my summary of the current developments in the filesystem: namely, what improvements we can expect (a lot), and what Linux and the BSDs can do to improve on the filesystem."

Joey Patterson writes "CNET News.com reports that the RIAA has sent cease-and-desist letters to four individuals for allegedly pirating its music on P2P networks." They have yet to publicly release the names of who they have contacted, but 4 of the 5 were Verizon subscribers involved with their previous high profile case.

swimgeek writes "The TV Technology for covering news as it happens is changing. This article specifically talks about the transition from ENG (Electronic News Gathering) to SNG (Satellite News Gathering). The American TV networks are close to spending $100 million for this transition, anticipating a possible war in Iraq."

dhilvert writes "David Levine and Michele Boldrin argue that current IP laws encourage an inefficient rent model and stifle the potential for innovation without intellectual monopoly. Levine teaches at UCLA and maintains an Economic and Game Theory page."

Doctor Beavis writes "As noted previously, Apple ordered developer James Speth to return his iTunes software developer kit and to stop distributing the iCommune plug-in for iTunes. Today, CNET has a story with further details and developments. Speth said that he will honor Apple's request to stop distributing his software, but he will build the same features into a standalone application. The next version of iCommune will work with iTunes and potentially other digital music players and will use Rendezvous, Apple's implementation of a protocol for automatic discovery of network-connected devices. Speth also said that the new version will be Open Source under the GPL."

Doug Bostrom writes "Over at FlightGear.org, Andy Ross describes how ATI's new Linux drivers only seem to work with "official" ATI cards (made by ATI), why that does not make sense, and a possible fix that unfortunately would mean booting Windows, if only for a few minutes."