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Apple Introduces "MacBook Wheel"
CommonCents noted an Apple announcement a few hours before the anticipated keynote. He says "Apples' latest must have gadget does away with the keyboard. With the new MacBook Wheel, Apple has replaced the traditional keyboard with a giant wheel."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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A TV Show Based On MAKE Magazine
ptorrone writes "Make: television debuted online and on public television (broadcast / cable tv). The series encourages everyone to invent, reinvent, recycle, upcycle, and act up. Based on the popular Make magazine, each half-hour episode hopes to inspire viewers to think, create, and, well, make. Each episode can be viewed or downloaded DRM-free, in HD on makezine.tv — the show is also available on Vimeo, YouTube, blip.tv and iTunes."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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How the City Hurts Your Brain
Hugh Pickens writes "The city has always been an engine of intellectual life and the 'concentration of social interactions' is largely responsible for urban creativity and innovation. But now scientists are finding that being in an urban environment impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory and suffers from reduced self-control. 'The mind is a limited machine,' says psychologist Marc Berman. 'And we're beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations.' Consider everything your brain has to keep track of as you walk down a busy city street. A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to redirect our attention constantly so that we aren't distracted by irrelevant things. This sort of controlled perception — we are telling the mind what to pay attention to — takes energy and effort. Natural settings don't require the same amount of cognitive effort. A study at the University of Michigan found memory performance and attention spans improved by 20 percent after people spent an hour interacting with nature. 'It's not an accident that Central Park is in the middle of Manhattan,' says Berman. 'They needed to put a park there.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Wyniki konsultacji rozliczeń usług IN TP i PTC
Stanowiska konsultacyjne w sprawie określenia warunków współpracy oraz zasad rozliczeń w zakresie świadczenia usług dostępu do sieci ruchomej PTC na numery sieci inteligentnej Telekomunikacji Polskiej.
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NZ File-Sharers, Remixers Guilty Upon Accusation
An anonymous reader writes "Next month, New Zealand is scheduled to implement Section 92 of the Copyright Amendment Act. The controversial act provides 'Guilt Upon Accusation,' which means that if a file-sharer is simply accused of copyright infringement he/she will be punished with summary Internet disconnection. Unlike most laws, this one has no appeal process and no punishment for false accusation, because they were removed after public consultation. The ISPs are up in arms and now artists are taking a stand for fair copyright."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Nie widziałeś w telewizji?
Nowy serwis, stare problemy. Wirtualne Media poinformowały, że TVP uruchomiło wersję beta swojego interaktywnego portalu. Jak ...
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Zimowisko w Trójmieście - Call For Papers
Trójmiejska Grupa Użytkowników Linuksa (TLUG) już po raz czwarty organizuje Zimowisko Linuksowe w Pucku :)
Impreza odbędzie się w dniach 9.01.2009 - 11.01.2009.
Miejsce bez zmian: HOM Puck (...
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A Look Back At Kurzweil's Predictions For 2009
marciot writes "It's interesting to look back at Ray Kurzweil's predictions for 2009 from a decade ago. He was dead on in predicting the ubiquity of portable computers, wireless, the emergency of digital objects, and the rise of privacy concerns. He was a little optimistic in certain areas, predicting the demise of rotating storage and the ubiquity of digital paper a bit earlier than it appears it will actually happen. On the topic of human-computer speech interfaces, though, he seems to be way off." And of course Kurzweil missed 9/11 and the fallout from that. His predictions might have been nearer the mark absent the war on terror.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Milky Way Heavier Than Thought, and Spinning Faster
An anonymous reader writes "The Milky Way is spinning much faster and has 50 per cent more mass than previously believed. This means the Milky Way is equivalent in size to our neighbor Andromeda — instead of being the little sister in the local galaxy group, as had been believed. One implication of this new finding is that we may collide with Andromeda sooner than we had thought, in 2 or 3 billion years instead of 5."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Tooth Regeneration Coming Soon
Ponca City, We love you writes "For thousands of years, losing teeth has been a routine part of human aging. Now the Washington Post reports that researchers are close to growing important parts of teeth from stem cells, including creating a living root from scratch, perhaps within one year. According to Pamela Robey of the NIH. 'Dentists say, "Give me a root and I can put a crown on it."' In a few years dentists will treat periodontal disease with regeneration by using stem cells to create hard and soft tissue; they will take out a tooth that is about to fall, and reconnect it firmly to the regenerated tissue. Although nobody is predicting when it will be possible to grow teeth on demand, in adults, to replace missing ones, a common guess is five to ten years. Baby and wisdom teeth are sources of stem cells that could be 'banked' for future health needs, says Robey. 'When you think about it, the teeth children put under their pillows may end up being worth much more than the tooth fairy's going rate. Plus, if you still have your wisdom teeth, it's nice to know you're walking around with your own source of stem cells.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Amazon S3 Adds Option To Make Data Accessors Pay
CWmike writes "Amazon.com has rolled out a new option for its Simple Storage Service (S3) that lets data owners shift the cost of accessing their information to users. Until now, individuals or businesses with information stored on S3 had to pay data-transfer costs to Amazon when others made use of the information. Amazon said the new Requester Pays option relieves data providers of that burden, leaving them to pay only the basic storage fees for the cloud computing service. The bigger question with the cloud is, who really pays? Mark Everett Hall argues that IT workers do."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Carefully Timed Jerks Could Power Space Elevator
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC has an interesting article on the long-standing issue of how to power the 'climber' that would ascend a space elevator into space. Previous ideas have included delivering microwave or laser power to the climber beamed from the Earth's surface, but now European Space Agency ground station engineer Age-Raymond Riise has demonstrated a device that could provide a "lift into space" for cheaper space missions along a 100,000-km long tether anchored to the Earth. Riise demonstrated sending power mechanically by providing carefully timed jerks of the cable at its base with a broomstick to represent the cable held in tension, an electric sander to provide a rhythmic vibration to the bottom of the stick, and three brushes representing the climber with their bristles pointing downwards allowing the climber assembly to slide upward along the broomstick as it moved slightly downward, but grip it as it moved slightly upward. 'It would be possible to make a suspension system that completely decouples the cabin where the passengers are,' says Riise. 'For them it would be a linear movement with very little disturbance.' Riise says that he has been approached by commercial elevator companies, who are researching new ideas for elevators in superscrapers where the simplicity of the approach makes it attractive when compared to other ideas for powering lifts, such as compressed air."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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ICANN Uses For-Profit Companies as "Comparables" in Its Employee Compensation
According to page 123 of ICANN's annual report:
d. Commitment to continued payment in the salary span of 50th to 75th percentile of for-profit market place of companies of a similar size and complexity to ICANN (the actual salary within this band determined by the individual's experience and talent and market position);
Note that the comparables have been "for-profit". This is obviously ridiculous, given the purported non-profit nature of ICANN, with its inherent job security. Indeed, ICANN has had major blunders, yet to my knowledge no staff were ever held accountable through termination or pay reductions.
The Economist magazine - Click to Enlarge
Source: Stephane Van GelderIn addition, by using the above criteria, ICANN staff know that they would personally benefit by increasing the size of the organization, thereby allowing themselves to be compared to a better "comparable" when determining compensation. This pro-size bias has already appeared to influenced ICANN policy formulation, for example rushing to roll out gTLDs which would bring in revenues to ICANN (and increased staff), despite the great opposition of the community. Indeed, ICANN appears to be promoting them as a fait accompli in media such as The Economist, with dog and pony shows to follow.
We see this spendthrift attitude in the ICANN fellowship program, where money is thrown away, even repeatedly to prior fellows ("Nine of the fellows are alumni from the past 5 programmes") while constituencies get limited or no support when they bear the brunt of the real input into policy work.
In conclusion, these bad incentives need to be corrected, through a more appropriate set of compensation principles. For example, the comparables should only include government and non-profit agencies. It is clear that things would get even worse if ICANN were to have its independence from US government oversight, and thus that oversight should continue indefinitely. Indeed, it is a slap in the face of consumers and the public that ICANN staff are feasting as if they are in a dot-com bubble company, rather than demonstrating the conservative financial and policy principles of non-profits and government agencies that are accountable to the public. Given the current economy, I am confident that ICANN will have no problems replacing any ICANN staff members who resign due to a reduction in salary to a level comparable to those in government or in non-profits.
Written by George Kirikos, President, Leap of Faith Financial Services Inc.. Visit the blog maintained by George Kirikos here.
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More under: Internet Governance, Top-Level Domains
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Kategorie: Internet i inne organizacje
Employees the Next (Continuing) Big Security Risk?
surely_you_cant_be_serious writes "A nationwide survey finds that most companies consider their systems vulnerable to attack. Historically, crime rates increase during recessions — and some believe that cybercrime may well follow suit, especially given massive layoffs and the dim prospects many laid-off employees face in finding a new job. 'One thing companies can start doing is monitoring their networks on an ongoing basis so that they understand the normal pattern of data flow and usage, Brill said. In many cases, companies may not have the internal capability to do this, but outsourcing options are available. Kroll Ontrack, for instance, will be rolling out a 24/7 monitoring service for its global clients manned from a US location by professionals in early 2009.'"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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China's Latest Internet Crackdown
Seven different government agencies, including the Ministry of Public Security and the State Council Information Office declared war on Internet smut today. 19 Internet companies, including Google, Baidu, Sina, and others, were cited for "violating public morality and harming the physical and mental health of youth and young people."
The official government online announcement is here. Another Chinese language report, including video of a TV report with footage of computer servers being confiscated by police at an unknown location and unknown time is here.
The meeting was chaired by Vice Minister Cai Mingzhao of the State Council Information Office (the same guy who met a few months back with Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, and who has been emphasizing the need for strategic control of the Internet for the past few years in various speeches). According to Reuters:
"Some websites have exploited loopholes in laws and regulations," said Cai Mingzhao, a deputy chief of the State Council Information Office, who chaired the meeting, according to a report on an official news website (www.china.com.cn).
"They have used all kinds of ways to distribute content that is low-class, crude and even vulgar, gravely damaging mores on the Internet."
The Information Office is the government face of the Party's propaganda and censorship machine.
Cai told officials to "fully grasp the gravity and threat of the vulgar current infesting the Internet" and said law-breakers face "stern punishment."
Representatives of Google, Baidu, Sina, and others who journalists contacted as of this writing have so far had no meaningful comment.
It is of course unclear to what extent this anti-smut crackdown is or isn't going to lead to a tightening on politically sensitive content as well. Historically in China (if you can call the story of China's Internet "history"), the technology used to censor porn has ended up being used more vigorously to censor political content than smut. The Financial Times has a story today quoting He Zhaohui, marketing manager at TRS Information Technology, "China's leading provider of search technology and text mining solutions." According to the FT, He says TRS is "thriving on the government's desire to better "manage" public opinion, comes as the political leadership is facing growing challenges, mostly voiced through the internet."
The folks over at Danwei.org, who have been following Chinese media regulations for years, aren't about to get their panties in a twist over loss of smut just yet. Alice Xin Liu writes: "This campaign is very similar to countless content cleansing campaigns over the past few years. It does not signify much except that the Net Nanny is making sure everyone knows who is boss before the Chinese New Year starts." Jeremy Goldkorn points out that on the same day this campaign is announced, the People's Daily website among others ran racy photos of Zhang Ziyi. Heck, it wasn't long ago that Xinhua was known widely around the China expat web as "Skinhua”… How quickly people forget…
I heard from a couple of reporters today who asked if there's been any other crackdown like this in the past. It seems that everybody has also forgotten the crackdown on video websites that took place last March, which caused the Chinese YouTube clone Tudou.com to go offline for 24 hours in order to upgrade its censorship and monitoring systems.
One reporter asked me whether this latest crackdown marks a new hard-line phase after the "relative freedom of 2008." I pointed out that the unblocking of a number of prominent foreign websites around the Olympics was only one part of the picture for 2008. Chinese domestic websites hosting blogs, chatrooms, and other user-generated content never let up on political censorship. It's just that foreigners only seem to notice what happens to foreign websites…
Written by Rebecca MacKinnon, Assistant Professor, University of Hong Kong. Visit the blog maintained by Rebecca MacKinnon here.
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More under: Access Providers, Censorship, Internet Governance, Policy & Regulation
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Kategorie: Internet i inne organizacje
A Hacker's Audacious Plan To Rule the Underground
An anonymous reader writes "Wired has the inside story of Max Butler, a former white hat hacker who joined the underground following a jail stint for hacking the Pentagon. His most ambitious hack was a hostile takeover of the major underground carding boards where stolen credit card and identity data are bought and sold. The attack made his own site, CardersMarket, the largest crime forum in the world, with 6,000 users. But it also made the feds determined to catch him, since one of the sites he hacked, DarkMarket.ws, was secretly a sting operation run by the FBI."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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China Determined to Purify the Internet, Cracks Down on Google and Other Major Websites
The Chinese government broadened its recent effort to limit pornography on the Internet by criticizing 19 Internet companies by name Monday, including Google and Baidu, the providers of the two most popular search engines in the country.
A statement posted by early Monday afternoon on a government-run news site said the Ministry of Public Security and six other government agencies would work together "to purify the Internet's cultural environment and protect the healthy development of minors." A similar statement had been issued Dec. 5 but attracted little attention.
Read full story: International Herald Tribune
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Kategorie: Internet i inne organizacje
Distributed "Nuclear Batteries" the New Infrastructure Answer?
thepacketmaster writes "The Star reports about a new power generation model using smaller distributed power generators located closer to the consumer. This saves money on power generation lines and creates an infrastructure that can be more easily expanded with smaller incremental steps, compared to bigger centralized power generation projects. The generators in line for this are green sources, but Hyperion Power Generation, NuScale, Adams Atomic Engines (and some other companies) are offering small nuclear reactors to plug into this type of infrastructure. The generator from Hyperion is about the size of a garden shed, and uses older technology that is not capable of creating nuclear warheads, and supposedly self-regulating so it won't go critical. They envision burying reactors near the consumers for 5-10 years, digging them back up and recycling them. Since they are so low maintenance and self-contained, they are calling them nuclear batteries."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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ESA Embraces Open Source With New SAR Toolbox
phyr writes "The European Space Agency (ESA) has released its Next ESA SAR Toolbox (NEST) freely as GPL for Linux and Windows. It provides an integrated viewer for reading, calibrating, post-processing and analysis of ESA (ERS 1&2, ENVISAT) and 3rd party (Radarsat2, TerraSarX, Alos Palsar, JERS) SAR level 1 data and higher. ESA has chosen to distribute the software as fully open source to allow the remote sensing community to easily develop new readers/writers and post-processors for SAR data with their NEST Java API. The software provides both a command line interface and GUI for all features including data conversion, graph processing, coregistration, multilooking, filtering, and band arithmetic."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Ubuntu Kung Fu
Lorin Ricker writes "Back in the dark ages of windows-based GUIs, corresponding to my own wandering VMS evangelical days, I became enamored of a series of books jauntily entitled Xxx Annoyances (from O'Reilly & Assocs.), where "Xxx" could be anything from "Windows 95", "Word", "Excel" or nearly piece of software which Microsoft produced. These were, if not the first, certainly among the most successful of the "tips & tricks" books that have become popular and useful to scads of hobbyists, ordinary users, hackers and, yes, even professionals in various IT pursuits. I was attracted, even a bit addicted, to these if only because they offered to try to make some useful sense out of the bewildering design choices, deficiencies and bugs that I'd find rampant in Windows and its application repertory. Then I found Keir Thomas, who has been writing about Linux for more than a decade. His new "tips" book entitled, Ubuntu Kung Fu — Tips & Tools for Exploring Using, and Tuning Linux, and published by Pragmatic Bookshelf, is wonderful. Having only recently wandered into the light of Linux, open source software, and Ubuntu in particular, this book comes as a welcome infusion to my addiction." Read below for the rest of Lorin's review.
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