Linux fréttir

We mentioned late last year how open source software called Ushahidi — which means 'testimony' in Swahili — developed for election monitoring in Kenya was being used to similar effect in Afghanistan. Now reader Peace Corps Online adds a report from the NY Times that Usahidi's is now becoming a hero of the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes. "Ushahidi is used to gather distributed data via SMS, email, or web and visualize it on a map or timeline. The program was developed after violence erupted during Kenya's disputed election in 2007. Ory Okolloh, a prominent Kenyan lawyer and blogger, had gone back to Kenya to vote and observe the election. After receiving threats about her work, she returned to South Africa where she posted her idea of an Internet mapping tool to allow people to report anonymously on violence and other misdeeds. Volunteers built the Ushahidi Web platform over a long weekend, and the site began plotting on a map, using the locations given by informants, user-generated cellphone reports of riots, stranded refugees, rapes, and deaths. When the Haitian earthquake struck, Ushahidi went into action receiving thousands of messages reporting trapped victims; the same happened following the Chile earthquake. The Washington Post also used Ushahidi during the recent blizzards to build a site to map road blockages and the location of available snowplows and blowers. 'Ushahidi suggests a new paradigm in humanitarian work,' writes Anand Giridharadas. 'The old paradigm was one-to-many: foreign journalists and aid workers jet in, report on a calamity, and dispense aid with whatever data they have. The new paradigm is many-to-many-to-many: victims supply on-the-ground data; a self-organizing mob of global volunteers translates text messages and helps to orchestrate relief; then journalists and aid workers use the data to target the response.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

conner_bw writes "XML co-founder Tim Bray has taken the job of 'Developer Advocate' at Google. Don't other companies call that position 'Evangelist?' Because he sure doesn't mince words against the iPhone in his first sermon: 'It's a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord's pleasure and fear his anger.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MikeChino sends in this excerpt from Inhabitat: "China already has the most advanced and extensive high-speed rail lines in the world, and soon that network will be connected all the way to Europe and the UK. With initial negotiations and surveys already complete, China is now making plans to connect its HSR line through 17 other countries in Asia and Eastern Europe in order to connect to the existing infrastructure in the EU. Additional rail lines will also be built into South East Asia as well as Russia, in what will likely become the largest infrastructure project in history." They hope to get it done within 10 years, with China providing the financing in exchange for raw materials, in some cases.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Erin Andrews bids adieu to peephole stalker

A Chicago-area man was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for secretly taking videos of America's sexiest sportscaster in the nude and then posting them online.…

What is your recession sales strategy?

Bethesda Softworks took advantage of the recent Game Developers Conference to take the wraps off a new game called Hunted: The Demon's Forge that they're partnering with development studio inXile to create. It's planned for the PC, Xbox 360, and PS3, though no release window has been set. It's a third-person action game with a swords & sorcery setting, and it features two heroes as they fight their way through monster-filled dungeons. The game is designed such that two users can play together online (no split-screen), each controlling one of the heroes. ShackNews summed it up thus: "From what I saw, Hunted rolled up ideas from a number of different games to create its modern reinterpretation of the dungeon crawl. There was the raw action appeal of wading through waves of goblins, spiders, and related denizens. The skill system and weapon upgrades bring in the character development side from a role playing game. And the co-op design with its warrior and archer dynamic introduces the reward of playing together like an MMO."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Diamonds are a fanbois' best friend

If you're an Apple fanboi with $19,999 burning a hole in your pocket, why not spend it on The World's First Diamond iPad?…

The power of collaboration within unified communications

superapecommando writes "Copyright holders have given up legal efforts to force Norwegian ISP Telenor to block filesharing site The Pirate Bay, one of the parties to the case said. The copyright holders, led by Norway's performing rights society TONO and by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry Norway (IFPI Norge), have lost two rounds in the Norwegian court system, and have now decided against appealing the case to Norway's supreme court."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "The domain COM was installed as one of the first set of top-level domains when the Domain Name System was first implemented for use on the Internet in January 1985. The internet celebrates a landmark event on the 15th of March — the 25th anniversary of the day the first .com name was registered. Of the 250 million websites, there are over 80 million active .com sites. In March 1985, Symbolics computers of Cambridge, Massachusetts entered the history books with an internet address ending in .com (however, on 27 August 2009, it was sold to XF.com Investments). That same year another five companies jumped on a very slow bandwagon. Here is a list of the 100 oldest still-existing registered .com domains."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For those too stubborn to upgrade

Microsoft has released automated workarounds designed to immunize users against a critical vulnerability in earlier versions of Internet Explorer, which criminals are already exploiting online.…

Case Study: WhatsUp keeps Legoland turnstyles ringing

Hugh Pickens writes "At the peak of a magnetic storm, the number of highly energetic 'killer electrons' strong enough to damage electronics and human tissue can increase by a factor of more than ten times, posing a danger to spacecraft, satellites, and astronauts. Killer electrons can penetrate satellite shielding, so if electrical discharges take place in vital components, a satellite can be damaged or even rendered inoperable. For many years, the mechanism by which killer electrons are produced has remained poorly understood, in spite of physicists' attempts at solving this puzzle. Now the ESA reports that data shows the increase in the creation of a substantial number of killer electrons is due to a two-step process. First, the initial acceleration is due to the strong shock-related magnetic field compression. Immediately after the impact of the interplanetary shock wave, Earth's magnetic field lines began wobbling at ultra low frequencies. In turn, these ULF waves effectively accelerate the seed electrons (provided by the first step) to become killer electrons. 'These new findings help us to improve the models predicting the radiation environment in which satellites and astronauts operate. With solar activity now ramping up, we expect more of these shocks to impact our magnetosphere over the months and years to come,' says Philippe Escoubet, ESA's Cluster mission manager."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft apes Apple

Mix10 Microsoft aims to lure Windows Phone 7 developers with free tools. That's the good news. The less-good news is that Redmond plans to lock down the platform à la Apple's App Store.…

Case Study: WhatsUp keeps Legoland turnstyles ringing

CWmike writes "Nokia asked a federal judge last week to toss out Apple's antitrust claims, saying the iPhone maker indulged in 'legal alchemy' when it tried to divert attention from its infringement of Nokia's intellectual property. The filing was the latest salvo in a battle that began in October 2009 when handset maker Nokia sued Apple, saying the iPhone infringed on 10 of its patents, and that Apple was trying 'to get a free ride on the back of Nokia's innovation.' Apple countered in December with a lawsuit of its own that not only claimed Nokia infringed 13 of its patents, but that Nokia also violated antitrust law by legally attacking Apple after it declined to pay what it called 'exorbitant royalties' and refused to give Nokia access to iPhone patents. 'These non-patent counterclaims are designed to divert attention away from free-riding off of Nokia's intellectual property, a practice Apple evidently believes should only be of paramount concern when it is the alleged victim,' Nokia charged in the motion. Apple is on a legal roll, having also recently sued the maker of Google's Nexus One, HTC, for patent infringement."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes with this quote from 1Up: "Trouble is brewing in Rapture. The recently released Sinclair Solutions multiplayer pack for BioShock 2 is facing upset players over the revelation that the content is already on the disc, and the $5 premium is an unlock code. It started when users on the 2K Forums noticed that the content is incredibly small: 24KB on the PC, 103KB on the PlayStation 3, and 108KB on the Xbox 360. 2K Games responded with a post explaining that the decision was made in order to keep the player base intact, without splitting it between the haves and have-nots."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Michael Seringhaus, a Yale Law School student, writes in the NY Times, 'To Stop Crime, Share Your Genes.' In order to prevent discrimination when it comes to collecting DNA samples from criminals (and even people who are simply arrested), he proposes that the government collect a DNA profile from everybody, perhaps at birth (yes, you heard that right)." Regarding the obvious issue of genetic privacy, Seringhaus makes this argument: "Your sensitive genetic information would be safe. A DNA profile distills a person’s complex genomic information down to a set of 26 numerical values, each characterizing the length of a certain repeated sequence of 'junk' DNA that differs from person to person. Although these genetic differences are biologically meaningless — they don’t correlate with any observable characteristics — tabulating the number of repeats creates a unique identifier, a DNA 'fingerprint.' The genetic privacy risk from such profiling is virtually nil, because these records include none of the health and biological data present in one’s genome as a whole."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Top talent choosing sides - or bailing

Updated The battle between Apple and Google is heating up, with execs taking potshots at each other and Silicon Valley insiders choosing sides - some by getting new business cards.…

The power of collaboration within unified communications

Trailrunner7 writes "Robert Hansen, a security researcher and CEO of SecTheory, has been gleaning intelligence from professional attackers in recent months, having a series of off-the-record conversations with spammers and malicious hackers in an effort to gain insight into their tactics, mindset and motivation. 'He's not the type to hack randomly, he's only interested in targeted attacks with big payouts. Well, the more I thought about it the more I thought that this is a very solvable problem for bad guys. There are already other types of bad guys who do things like spam, steal credentials and DDoS. For that to work they need a botnet with thousands or millions of machines. The chances of a million machine botnet having compromised at least one machine within a target of interest is relatively high.' Hansen's solution to the hacker's problem provides a glimpse into a business model we might see in the not-too-distant future. It's an evolutionary version of the botnet-for-hire or malware-as-a-service model that's taken off in recent years. In Hansen's model, an attacker looking to infiltrate a specific network would not spend weeks throwing resources against machines in that network, looking for a weak spot and potentially raising the suspicion of the company's security team. Instead, he would contact a botmaster and give him a laundry list of the machines or IP addresses he's interested in compromising. If the botmaster already has his hooks into the network, the customer could then buy access directly into the network rather than spending his own time and resources trying to get in."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

'Visually identical' pads siphoned customer data

Crooks planted bogus payment card processing terminals at multiple locations operated by the Hancock Fabrics chain store that allowed for the theft of sensitive financial data from customers, the company warned.…

Web threats: Why conventional protection doesn't work

waderoush writes "E Ink, which makes the monochrome electrophoretic screens used in the Amazon Kindle, the Barnes & Noble Nook, the Sony Reader line, and other e-readers, is gearing up to supply manufacturers with the first color versions of its displays by early next year, according to an Xconomy interview with T.H. Peng, a vice president with Taiwan's Prime View International, which bought E Ink last year. Peng argues that E Ink has nothing to fear from the e-book apps on the Apple iPad and other devices with color LCDs, which, in his view, produce more eye strain and aren't as suitable for digital reading. Nonetheless, the company says its first color screens in 2011 will have newspaper-quality color, followed within a couple of years by improved versions that can handle magazine-style content."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crap snoop app escapes whack-a-mole policy

A bogus application that lures Facebook users by falsely offering to show who has been viewing their profile has been exposed as a scam.…

Web threats: Why conventional protection doesn't work

An anonymous reader writes "This document is a classified (SECRET/NOFORN), 32-page US counterintelligence investigation into WikiLeaks (PDF). 'The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the US government are providing sensitive or classified information to Wikileaks.org cannot be ruled out.' It concocts a plan to fatally marginalize the organization. Since WikiLeaks uses 'trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers or whistleblowers,' the report recommends 'The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the Wikileaks.org Web site.' [As two years have passed since the date of the report, with no WikiLeaks' source exposed, it appears that this plan was ineffective.] As an odd justification for the plan, the report claims that 'Several foreign countries including China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe have denounced or blocked access to the Wikileaks.org website.' The report provides further justification by enumerating embarrassing stories broken by WikiLeaks — US equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable US violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.