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Submission + - UK plans to allow warrantless searches of Internet history. (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by whoever57
whoever57 writes: The UK government plans to require ISPs and telcoms companies to maintain browsing and email history of UK residents for a period of 12 months and make the data available to police on request without a warrant. "The new powers would allow the police to seize details of the website and searches being made by people they wanted to investigate. " Exactly how they expect the ISPs to provide search histories now that most Google searches use SSL isn't explained (and probably not even considered by those proposing the legislation). Similarly with gmail and other email providers using SMTP TLS and IMAPS, much email is opaque to ISPs. Will this drive more use of VPNs and TOR?
Space

Submission + - No Intelligent Aliens Detected in Gliese 581 (discovery.com)

Submitted by
astroengine
astroengine writes: "Using an Australian very long baseline array (VLBA) of three radio antennae, the first very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) campaign has been carried out on a SETI target star: the famous Gliese 581 red dwarf. However, after 8 hours of observing the star — thought to play host to six exoplanets, two of which are in the star's "habitable zone" — no alien signals were detected. This result isn't surprising, as the likelihood of us stumbling across intelligent aliens living in the Gliese 581 system transmitting radio is extremely slim, but it does validate VLBI as a very exciting means of using the vast amount of exoplanetary data (coming from missions such as the Kepler space telescope) for "directed SETI" projects."
Businesses

Submission + - SpaceX Brownsville Space Port Opposed by Texas Environmentalists (yahoo.com)

Submitted by
MarkWhittington
MarkWhittington writes: "The proposed SpaceX space port in Brownsville, Texas, has run into opposition from an environmental group. Environment Texas is conducting a petition drive to stop the project. According to a news release by the group, the proposed space port, which would include a launch pad and control and spacecraft processing facilities, would be "almost surrounded" by a park and wildlife refuge. Environment Texas claims the launching of rockets would "scare the heck" out of every creature in the area and would "spray noxious chemicals all over the place." The petition will demand SpaceX build the space port elsewhere."
Your Rights Online

Submission + - Why the GPL licensing cops are the good guys (infoworld.com)

Submitted by rtfa-troll
rtfa-troll writes: 'GPL enforcement by Software Freedom Conservancy puts electronics makers on notice, leaves business users untouched', says Infoworld, going on to explain 'You are several orders of magnitude more likely to be raided by your proprietary suppliers, in the form of the Business Software Alliance, than to ever hear from SFC, let alone face any action. License compliance is a major and costly issue for proprietary software, but the case concerns an end-user license agreement (EULA), not a source license.' the expertly written article gives a good summary of why having GPL licenses enforced helps everybody except for 'hardware manufacturers — typically those creating low-cost consumer and business electronics' who need to verify that they pass on the same rights to others as they received with the original code.

Submission + - Geezers (over 55 years) pick stronger passwords than youngins (under 25) (newscientist.com)

Submitted by McGruber
McGruber writes: Joseph Bonneau, a computer scientist at the University of Cambridge, calculated the password strengths of nearly 70 million Yahoo! users. He compared the strengths of passwords chosen by different demographic groups and compared the results.

People over the age of 55 pick passwords double the strength of those chosen by people under 25 years old.
Education

Submission + - Speech Recognition using the Raspberry Pi (aonsquared.co.uk)

Submitted by
aonsquared
aonsquared writes: "In a previous slashdot story I demonstrated a voice-controlled robotic arm using the open-source speech decoder Julius. This time, I have managed to port the system to a Raspberry Pi to control the same robotic arm, and as usual, posted the tutorial and source code. Some negative reviews of the Raspberry Pi are starting to appear, and they're missing the educational point of this device — I'm hoping this will counter the naysayers, and help inspire a new generation of hackers, as well as also bring open-source speech recognition the same attention as proprietary solutions (i.e Siri) are getting!"
Politics

Submission + - 'Legitimized' cyberwar will make culture wars much dirtier (itworld.com)

Submitted by DillyTonto
DillyTonto writes: US officials have acknowledged playing a role in the development and deployment of Stuxnet, Duqu and other cyberweapons against Iran.
The acknowledgement makes cyberattacks more legitimate as a tool of not-quite-lethal international diplomacy.
It also legitimizes them as more-combative tools for political conflict over social issues, in the same way Tasers gave police less-than-lethal alternatives to shooting suspects and gave those who abuse their power something other than a club to hit a suspect with. Political parties and single-issue political organizations already use "opposition research" to name-and-shame their opponents with real or exaggerated revelations from a checkered past, jerrymander districts to ensure their candidates a victory and vote-suppression or get-out-the-vote efforts to skew vote tallies. Imagine what they'll do with custom malware, the ability to DDOS an opponent's web site or redirect donations from an opponent's site to their own.
Cyberweapons may give nations a way to attack enemies without killing anyone. They'll definitely give domestic political groups a whole new world of dirty tricks to play.
Australia

Submission + - What is a patent troll? (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by schliz
schliz writes: Australian tech publication iTnews is defining ”patent trolls" as those who claim rights to an invention without commercializing it, and notes that government research organization CSIRO could come under that definition.

The CSIRO in April reached a $220 million settlement over three US telcos’ usage of WLAN that it invented in the early 1990s. Critics have argued that the CSIRO had failed to contribute to the world’s first wifi 802.11 standard, failed to commercialize the wifi chip through its spin-off, Radiata, and chose to wage its campaign in the Eastern District courts of Texas, a location favored by more notorious patent trolls.
Open Source

Submission + - Spanish Basque --all government software must b open sourced and published. (h-online.com)

Submitted by lsatenstein
lsatenstein writes: The regional government of Spain's Basque Country has decreed that all software produced for Basque government agencies and public bodies should be open sourced. Joinup, the European Commission's open source web site, cites an articleSpanish language link in Spanish newspaper El Pais, saying that the only exceptions will be software that directly affects state security and a handful of projects which are being conducted in conjunction with commercial software suppliers.

Comment Re:question (Score 2) 135

by duh P3rf3ss3r (#39028645) Attached to: New Horizons: One Billion Miles From Pluto

The probe started out at roughly our speed and accelerated to 34,471 mph, or about 15.4 km/s. In the absence of a complex acceleration history, the simple, first-order approximation of the probe's average speed over the last 6 years is about 7.7 km/s or about 2.6e-5 c. At that speed, the relativistic effect is about 0.99999999967015470011, meaning that the probe has aged about 62 milliseconds less than you have.
News

Submission + - Novell wins over SCO again (uscourts.gov)

Submitted by duh P3rf3ss3r
duh P3rf3ss3r writes: The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeal has just affirmed the District Courts ruling in SCO v Novell in its entirety. The decision is quite a good read and lays out the reasons why the court has rejected, in toto, SCO's attempt to re-argue the case before the Court of Appeals. Is this the last gasp for SCO or will they try to appeal this to the Supreme Court? The betting lines open at 11...

Comment Re:Atheist claims have other fundamental problems (Score 1) 318

by duh P3rf3ss3r (#35832086) Attached to: All Languages Linked To Common Source

I'm afraid this is just silly.

There is a very simple action that would invalidate the claims of atheists: that would be for a god, any god, to reveal himself in some obvious, unequivocal, unmistakable way. Like, pop up on the nightly news and heal an amputee or something.

The theists, on the other hand, are the ones making the unfalsifiable claims. They're the ones claiming that there exists a sky fairy who chooses to keep himself hidden from man and whose presence can only be intimated by reading an ancient book or books with the aid of some sort of secret decoder ring.

Please, put aside your rancour for a second and tell me, truthfully, which side is making a claim which cannot be falsified...

Oh, wait, you're an AC. I should have known better than respond because you're only here to make yourself feel like you're too good to be living in mommy's basement among piles of pizza boxes and soiled Kleenex.

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