IT-Code-News: IT News HeadLines (Slashdot Stories) 13/09/2010

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

IT News HeadLines (Slashdot Stories) 13/09/2010

How Good Software Makes Us Stupid
siliconbits writes "The BBC has an interesting article about how ever improving software damages our ability to think innovatively. "Search engines(TM) function of providing us with information almost instantly means people are losing their intellectual capacity to store information, Nicolas Carr, said". This sadly convinced some journos to come up with wildfire titles such as "Google damages users' brains, author claims"."

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HP To Acquire ArcSight For 1.5 Billion
An anonymous reader writes "HP and ArcSight have signed a definitive agreement for HP to acquire ArcSight, a security and compliance management company, for $43.50 per share, or an enterprise value of $1.5 billion. The acquisition will be conducted by means of a cash tender offer for all of ArcSight's outstanding shares of common stock. The closing of the acquisition, which is subject to customary closing conditions, is expected to occur by the end of the calendar year."

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YouTube Begins Live Streaming Trials
An anonymous reader writes "YouTube is running a (very) brief trial of their new live streaming platform: 'This new platform integrates live streaming directly into YouTube channels; all broadcasters need is a webcam or external USB/FireWire camera. Included in the test is a "Live Comments" module which lets you engage with the broadcaster and the broader YouTube community. For the purpose of the trial, this offering will only be available today and tomorrow. Based on the results of this initial test, we'll evaluate rolling out the platform more broadly to our partners worldwide.'"

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Anti-US Hacker Takes Credit For Worm
angry tapir writes "Credit for the "Here You Have" worm (recently discussed on Slashdot), has been taken by a hacker known as 'Iraq Resistance' who says the worm was designed, in part, as a propaganda tool. He said he had not expected the worm to spread as broadly as it had, and noted that he could have done much more damage to victims. 'I could smash all those infected but I wouldn't,' said the hacker. 'I hope all people understand that I am not negative person!' In other parts of the message, he was critical of the US war in Iraq. For a brief period early the worm accounted for about 10 percent of the spam on the Internet."

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Security Guards, Alarm Companies Object to Australia's National Fiber Network
natecochrane writes "Australia's proposed high-speed National Broadband Network has put the fate of more than a million security alarm systems that alert Australians to fire, home invasion, break-in and medical emergency in limbo pending the building of a simulated test bed next year. A group that represents security guards and those that supply monitored alarms has concerns that ranged from the inconvenient ('angry customers woken by their alarm systems beeping' during a nightly NBN upgrade) to life-threatening in the case of medical alarms, its CEO said. 'Under the fibre-optic system there won't be that redundancy and backup [from the copper phone system]. So if it goes down no one will know,' ASIAL CEO Bryan de Caires said."

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Fujitsu Eyes Wireless Gadget Charging For 2012
angry tapir writes "Researchers at Fujitsu Laboratories have developed a wireless charging system that they say can simultaneously charge a variety of portable gadgets over a distance of several centimeters without the need for cables. The system, which will be detailed at a technical conference in Japan this week, could begin appearing in mobile phones and other products as soon as 2012, the company said. Fujitsu's system is based on magnetic resonance in which power can be wirelessly sent between two coils that are tuned to resonate at the same frequency."

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Ask.com To Shut Down Bloglines
angry tapir writes "Bloglines, the venerable RSS reader, will cease to exist in a few weeks, according to its owner, Ask.com. Users should export their syndicated feeds to another RSS reader, as Bloglines will be shut down on Oct. 1, Ask.com said Friday in a blog post. Ask.com has posted instructions on the Bloglines home page for exporting feeds to another RSS management service."

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September Is Cyborg Month
Snowmit writes "In May 1960, Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline presented a paper called 'Drugs, Space, and Cybernetics.' The proceedings of the symposium were published in 1961, but, before that, an excerpt of Clynes & Kline's paper appeared in the September issue of Astronautics magazine (issue 13), entitled Cyborgs and Space [PDF]. Aside from a mention in the New York Times, that's is the first time the word appears in print. This month is the 50th anniversary of that article. To commemorate, a group of writers and artists have gotten together to create 50 Post About Cyborgs. Over the course of the month, there will be essays, fiction, links to great older material, comics, and even a song. We're going to talk about Daleks, IEDs, Renaissance memory palaces, chess computers, prosthetic imagination, Videodrome, mutants, sports, and maybe the Bible. To kick things off, Kevin Kelly wrote this essay arguing that we've been cyborgs all along."

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Is DIY Algae Farming the Future?
hex0D points to this "interview with Aaron Baum explaining why people growing algae at home for food can help the environment and their health, and what he's doing to facilitate this. 'We'd like to create an international network of people growing all kinds of algae in their homes in a small community scale, sharing information, doing it all in an open source way. We'd be like the Linux of algae – do-it-yourself with low-cost materials and shared information.' And one of the low-cost materials is your household urine."

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Child Abuse Verdict Held Back By MS Word Glitch
An anonymous reader writes "Last week several defendants including one high-profile TV presenter were sentenced in Portugal in what has been known as the Casa Pia scandal. The judges delivered on September 3 a summary of the 2000-page verdict, which would be disclosed in full only three days later. The disclosure of the full verdict has been postponed from September 8 to a yet-to-be-announced date, allegedly because the full document was written in several MS Word files which, when merged together, retained 'computer related annotations which should not be present in any legal document.' (Google translated article.) Microsoft specialists were called in to help the judges sort out the 'text formatting glitch,' while the defendants and their lawyers eagerly wait to access the full text of the verdict."

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Burglary Ring Used Facebook Places To Find Targets
Kilrah_il writes "A burglary ring was caught in Nashua, NH due to the vigilance of an off-duty police officer. The group is credited with 50 acts of burglaries, the targets chosen because they posted their absence from home on the Internet. '"Be careful of what you post on these social networking sites," said Capt. Ron Dickerson. "We know for a fact that some of these players, some of these criminals, were looking on these sites and identifying their targets through these social networking sites."' Well, I guess the prophecies came true."

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IE9 Team Says "Our GPU Acceleration Is Better Than Yours"
An anonymous reader writes "Over on the IE blog Microsoft's Ted Johnson writes, 'With IE9, developers have a fully-hardware accelerated display pipeline that runs from their markup to the screen. Based on their blog posts, the hardware-accelerated implementations of other browsers generally accelerate one phase or the other, but not yet both. Delivering full hardware acceleration, on by default, is an architectural undertaking. When there is a desire to run across multiple platforms, developers introduce abstraction layers and inevitably make tradeoffs which ultimately impact performance and reduce the ability of a browser to achieve 'native' performance. Getting the full value of the GPU is extremely challenging and writing to intermediate layers and libraries instead of an operating system's native support makes it even harder. Windows' DirectX long legacy of powering of the most intensive 3D games has made DirectX the highest performance GPU-based rendering system available.' Some Mozillians hit back in the comments to the IE Blog post and others have written blog posts of their own. PC Mag's Michael Muchmore seems to conclude that IE9 and Firefox 4 are more or less the same (despite the title of his article) while Chrome currently lags behind."

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Geocentrists Convene To Discuss How Galileo Was Wrong
rollcall writes "'Galileo Was Wrong' is an inaugural conference to discuss the 'detailed and comprehensive treatment of the scientific evidence supporting Geocentrism, the academic belief that the Earth is immobile in the center of the universe.' The geocentrists argue that 'Scientific evidence available to us within the last 100 years that was not available during Galileo's confrontation shows that the [Catholic] Church's position on the immobility of the Earth is not only scientifically supportable, but it is the most stable model of the universe and the one which best answers all the evidence we see in the cosmos.' I, like many of you, am scratching my head wondering how people still think this way. Unfortunately, there is still a significant minority of Western people who believe that the Earth is the center of the universe: 18% of Americans, 16% of Germans, and 19% of Britons." I hope there is live blogging from the conference.

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Defending Self In a Case of On-Line Identity Theft?
SoccerDad41 writes "I am a systems administrator for an Indiana-based bricks-n-clicks retailer currently suspended because an unscrupulous typosquatter stole my name and registration information for his/her fraudulent domain registration. My company hired a third party service to protect their trademark by identifying and terminating infringing web sites. The third party identified a domain name, performed a WhoIs lookup & issued a complaint in compliance within ICANN's rules. This was presumably all reported back to our Legal department and it was noticed that the name on the domain registration matched mine. I have a locally uncommon ethnic last name so an immediate connection to me was made & although I protested my absolute innocence in the matter, I have been suspended on grounds of violating non-compete policies pending proof that it isn't me. The fraudulent domain registration was made with a different registrar (let's call them Registrar B) than the one my company uses (let's call them Registrar A). The public parts of the registration information at Registrar B match pretty exactly those of my legitimate domain registrations at Registrar A, including Registrar A's mailing address and phone number. The only things left out in the mailing address are the reference to a domain name and ATTN: Registrar A. Of course the anonymized email address differs as well. Surely I'm not the first in the Slashdot community to find myself in this situation. I'd like to avoid incurring the cost of a lawyer but I am intent on maintaining my good name and continued employment. What are my rights and responsibilities in this matter? What is my best course of action? How did you resolve this issue? How can I prove it's not me?"

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Salesforce Uses Chatter To Monitor Employees
storagedude writes "At the launch of Chatter Mobile this week, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff said he has been using the Facebook-like business service to monitor employee communications and identify a 'secret network' of employees who are influential in driving the business. Asked if employees felt like they were being spied on by Big Brother, Benioff replied, 'There are certain things appropriate in a business environment. We're not talking about a tea party, we're talking about how to get things fixed.' With 20,000 companies already using the three-month-old service, it is no doubt being put to similar use elsewhere. While Salesforce's use of Chatter to monitor employees appears to be legal, the issue underscores just how much social networks can be mined for information — even for things they weren't intended for."

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India's $35 7-Inch Android Tablet to Hit in January
indogiree writes "Engadget reports that India has just awarded the manufacturing contract to HCL Technologies. The first shipment will supposedly only contain the 7-inch model and is set to arrive on January 10. It's unclear if the $35 price has stuck or whether India's been successful in plans to eventually drive the price down to $10 with the help of large orders and government subsidies. HCL Technologies plans to initially produce 100,000 units. Among the key features of this India-based tablet include 2GB of RAM, web-conferencing, PDF reader unzip, WiFi, camera and USB connectivity."

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Acer Dual-Screen, Multitouch Laptop Leaks Out
An anonymous reader writes "A 15" laptop from Acer that is currently in production features dual-multitouch displays, one for the main display and one as the keyboard/mouse. It has a 2.67GHz Intel Core i5 processor and runs Windows 7. No release date or pricing information yet as this unit is still heavily in production/testing phases." Replacing a keyboard with a touchscreen sounds like a mixed blessing to me, but not everyone agrees. Witness the (great big) Kno dual-touchscreen e-reader, and the Toshiba Libretto W100 dual-screen mini-laptop, now shipping in Japan.

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Orchestra To Turn Copyright-Free Classical Scores Into Copyright-Free Music
destinyland writes "An online music site has raised over $13,000 to hire a full orchestra to record royalty-free classical music. ('"Although the actual symphonies are long out of copyright, there is separate protection for every individual performance by an orchestra," notes one technology site.') MusOpen has reached their fundraising goal for both the orchestra and a recording facility, and will now record the complete symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky. And because their fundraising deadline doesn't end until Tuesday, they've promised to add additional recordings for every additional $1,000 raised."

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£32k a Day For Birmingham Council Website
An anonymous reader writes "Birmingham Wired have uncovered that Birmingham City Council spend on average £32,000 a day maintaining a council website that has cost the tax-payer over £48 million to date, while councils nationwide prepare to say goodbye to 26,000 jobs due to budget deficits. Capita, a London based outsourcing company, states on their website: 'To date we've invested £48.4m in a combination of staff training, network upgrades, server replacements, hardware and software — and we continue to drive efficiency through innovation.'"

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Gartner Predicts Android Most Popular Mobile OS By 2014
mikesd81 writes "According to Gartner research firm, Google's Android smartphone operating system will in a single year have leapfrogged competitors like Apple's iPhone, Research in Motion's Blackberry and Microsoft Windows phones in global popularity, and will challenge Nokia to become the world's most popular mobile OS by 2014. Gartner says that the explosive growth of Android will give it 17.7% of world wide sales by the end of 2010. ... Analysts also say there are number of things that could derail Android's growth, including Oracle's lawsuit over Java patents."

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Microsoft Complaints Help Russian Gov't Pursue Political Opposition Groups
asaz989 writes "The New York Times reports that Russia selectively pursues software piracy complaints from Microsoft in order to suppress the opposition — confiscating computers for evidence, searching offices, and the like. Microsoft lawyers usually back the authorities in such cases, even when cases such as that of the environmentalist group Baikal Waves, which went out of its way to buy licenses to prevent police harassment and nevertheless had its offices raided, and its computers confiscated. Microsoft participated in this legal process. Published alongside this story, under the same byline, is a related piece on the collusion of Microsoft lawyers with corrupt Russian police in extorting money from the targets of software piracy investigations. In a responding press release, the company states, 'Microsoft antipiracy efforts are designed to honor both [antipiracy concerns and human rights], but we are open to feedback on what we can do to improve in that regard.'"

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GE Closes Last US Light Bulb Factory
pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that last major GE factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the US is closing this month, marking a small, sad exit for a product and company that can trace their roots to Thomas Alva Edison's innovations in the 1870s. What made the plant vulnerable is, in part, a 2007 energy conservation measure passed by Congress that set standards essentially banning ordinary incandescents by 2014 but rather than setting off a boom in the US manufacture of replacement lights, the leading replacement lights are compact fluorescents, or CFLs, which are made almost entirely overseas. GE developed a plan to see what it would take to retrofit a plant that makes traditional incandescents into one that makes CFLs but even with a $40 million investment the new plant's CFLs would have cost about 50 percent more than those from China. 'Everybody's jumping on the green bandwagon,' says Pat Doyle, 54, who has worked at the plant for 26 years. But 'we've been sold out. First sold out by the government. Then sold out by GE.'"

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Google Caffeine Drops MapReduce, Adds "Colossus"
An anonymous reader writes "With its new Caffeine search indexing system, Google has moved away from its MapReduce distributed number crunching platform in favor of a setup that mirrors database programming. The index is stored in Google's BigTable distributed database, and Caffeine allows for incremental changes to the database itself. The system also uses an update the Google File System codenamed 'Colossus.'"

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32k a Day For Birmingham Council Website
An anonymous reader writes "Birmingham Wired have uncovered that Birmingham City Council spend on average £32,000 a day maintaining a council website that has cost the tax-payer over £48 million to date, while councils nationwide prepare to say goodbye to 26,000 jobs due to budget deficits. Capita, a London based outsourcing company, states on their website: 'To date we've invested £48.4m in a combination of staff training, network upgrades, server replacements, hardware and software — and we continue to drive efficiency through innovation.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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