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Comment Re:Learn your AVC's (Score 1) 567

by geoffspear (#37182208) Attached to: Most People Have Never Heard of CTRL+F
Last night my wife accidentally erased an email she was typing with Undo (from a contextual menu, trying to use spellcheck on a Mac). Naturally, she only complained to me about it after getting annoyed and closing the window, too late to learn about the wonders of Redo.
Privacy

Submission + - NSA monitors all web traffic: ex-AT&T tech (rawstory.com)

Submitted by Sir Tandeth
Sir Tandeth writes: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Story?id=3833172&page=1 A former technician at AT&T, who alleges that the telecom giant forwards virtually all of its internet traffic into a "secret room" to facilitate government spying, says the whole operation reminds him of something out of Orwell's 1984. Appearing on MSNBC's Countdown program, whistleblower Mark Klein told Keith Olbermann that a copy of all internet traffic passing over AT&T lines was copied into a locked room at the company's San Francisco office — to which only employees with National Security Agency clearance had access.
Privacy

Submission + - Google to remove identifying data from search logs

Submitted by
darkuncle
darkuncle writes: "Via techdirt: a couple of Google lawyers have announced via the Google Blog that Google will begin removing identifying data from search logs after 18-24 months in an effort to make logs "much more anonymous". This is particularly interesting in light of recent stories about search log data being used in trials. One wonders (as noted by TechLiberation) how data can be made "more anonymous" — either it is, or it isn't. In any case, law enforcement (especially the U.S. government) will probably be less than thrilled with this development (witness pending legislation and general calls by law enforcement for mandatory data retention, both in the U.S. and abroad)."
Censorship

EFF Forces DMCA Abuser to Apologize 222

Posted by samzenpus from the depths-of-my-mothers-basement-I-stab-at-thee dept.
destinyland writes "The EFF just announced victory over a serial abuser of DMCA copyright notices. To set an example, their settlement required Michael Crook to record a video apology to the entire internet for interfering with free speech. He's also required to withdraw every bogus DMCA notice, and refrain from future bogus notices, never contest the original image again, and take a remedial class on copyright law. He'd attempted to use flaws in the DMCA to censor an embarrassing picture of himself that he just didn't want appearing online — but instead the whole thing backfired."
Programming

How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People 241

Posted by Hemos from the these-people-have-a-poison-aoe-need-totems-to-cleanse dept.
CoolVibe writes "Two Subversion developers talk at Google about how to keep pests and malcontents out of your open source projects. From the abstract: 'Every open source project runs into people who are selfish, uncooperative, and disrespectful. These people can silently poison the atmosphere of a happy developer community. Come learn how to identify these people and peacefully de-fuse them before they derail your project. Told through a series of (often amusing) real-life anecdotes and experiences.'"
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Reflectivity Reaches a New Low

Submitted by
sporkme
sporkme writes: "A new nanocoating material developed by a team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has the lowest level of reflectivity ever seen, or not seen in this case. The amount of light reflected by the composite of silica nanorods and aluminum nitride is almost the same amount reflected by air. From the article:

Schubert and his coworkers have created a material with a refractive index of 1.05, which is extremely close to the refractive index of air and the lowest ever reported. Window glass, for comparison, has a refractive index of about 1.45.
. . .
Using a technique called oblique angle deposition, the researchers deposited silica nanorods at an angle of precisely 45 degrees on top of a thin film of aluminum nitride, which is a semiconducting material used in advanced light-emitting diodes (LEDs). From the side, the films look much like the cross section of a piece of lawn turf with the blades slightly flattened.
Suggested applications include increased efficiency in solar cells, more energy-efficient lighting and advances in quantum mechanics. No word yet on invisibility cloaks."

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