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| Japan Demands Probe of iPod Nano Flameouts :: media |
| Posted by: kdawson on 8/19/2008 8:41 PM |
| From the hot-pockets department. |
| iminplaya sends in an item from TechNewsWorld that begins, "Several incidents of iPod Nanos bursting into flames have created consumer jitters in gadget-happy Japan. Apple is downplaying the problem, pointing out that no major injuries or damage have been reported. The problem is due to defective batteries, the company said, and only a tiny percentage of the devices have caught on fire." Japan has seen 14 such incidents so far, two in recent days. iminplaya adds, "I like that. Only a 'tiny percentage'... Is anybody beginning to understand why I would prefer that these devices not be allowed on airplanes?" 
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| 93 comments. Read more... |
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| Adobe Flash Ads Launching Clipboard Hijack Attacks :: security |
| Posted by: kdawson on 8/19/2008 6:54 PM |
| From the poisening-the-ad-pool department. |
| bullyBEEF writes "Malicious hackers are using booby-trapped Flash banner ads to hijack clipboards for use in rogue security software attacks. In the Web attacks, which affect Mac, Windows, and Linux users running Firefox, IE, and Safari, bad guys are seizing control of the machine's clipboard (probably using the Flash command setClipboard) and inserting a hard-to-delete URL that points to a fake anti-virus program. A number of legitimate sites have been seen to host acs carrying the attack — including Newsweek, Digg, and MSNBC.com. Researcher Aviv Raff offers a harmless demo of how it's done." 
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| 192 comments. Read more... |
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| New Multi-GPU Technology With No Strings Attached :: graphics |
| Posted by: kdawson on 8/19/2008 5:08 PM |
| From the here-process-this department. |
| Vigile writes "Multi-GPU technology from both NVIDIA and ATI has long been dependent on many factors including specific motherboard chipsets and forcing gamers to buy similar GPUs within a single generation. A new company called Lucid Logix is showing off a product that could potentially allow vastly different GPUs to work in tandem while still promising near-linear scaling on up to four chips. The HYDRA Engine is dedicated silicon that dissects DirectX and OpenGL calls and modifies them directly to be distributed among the available graphics processors. That means the aging GeForce 6800 GT card in your closet might be useful once again and the future of one motherboard supporting both AMD and NVIDIA multi-GPU configurations could be very near." 
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| 115 comments. Read more... |
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| Judge Rules Man Cannot Be Forced To Decrypt HD :: court |
| Posted by: kdawson on 8/19/2008 3:21 PM |
| From the cold-dead-fingers department. |
| I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "In Vermont, US Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier has ruled that forcing someone to divulge the password to decrypt their hard drive violates the 5th Amendment. Border guards testify that they saw child pornography on the defendant's laptop when the PC was on, but they made the mistake of turning it off and were unable to access it again because the drive was protected by PGP. Although prosecutors offered many ways to get around the 5th Amendment protections, the Judge would have none of that and quashed the grand jury subpoena requesting the defendant's PGP passphrase. A conviction is still likely because prosecutors have the testimony of the two border guards who saw the drive while it was open." The article stresses the potential importance of this ruling (which was issued last November but went unnoticed until now): "Especially if this ruling is appealed, US v. Boucher could become a landmark case. The question of whether a criminal defendant can be legally compelled to cough up his encryption passphrase remains an unsettled one, with law review articles for the last decade arguing the merits of either approach." Update: 08/19 23:49 GMT by KD : Several readers have pointed out that this story in fact did not go unnoticed. 
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| 505 comments. Read more... |
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| DPI and Net Neutrality's Overseas Weak Spot :: internet |
| Posted by: kdawson on 8/19/2008 2:38 PM |
| From the in-by-the-back-door department. |
| Ian Lamont writes "An unnamed source at an American ISP says staff there briefly considered using Deep Packet Inspection to comply with an order from Argentina's Department of Justice to block access to a local gambling site. The ISP ended up not going that route, owing to the cost, but some engineers at the company worry that DPI will eventually be implemented on the ISP's overseas network, thereby positioning it for an easier US rollout should Net Neutrality lose out in Washington. Besides being used for traffic-shaping, DPI can also monitor the traffic of ISP subscribers to supply targeted advertising." 
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| 69 comments. Read more... |
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| IBM and AMD Create First 22nm SRAM Cell :: ibm |
| Posted by: kdawson on 8/19/2008 1:56 PM |
| From the moore-and-moore-tiny department. |
| arcticstoat notes an announcement from IBM that, along with technology partners, they have produced the first working sample of a SRAM cell built on a 22nm fabrication process. According to the article, this represents the next generation after 32nm process chips and won't be in products for some years. "The technology was developed with several partners, including AMD, Toshiba, STMicroelectronics and Freescale, as well as the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, where IBM performs a lot of its semiconductor research. IBM says that the cell's development involved 'novel fabrication processes,' including high-NA immersion lithography..., high-K metal gate stacks, extremely thin silicide, damascene copper contacts, and advanced activation techniques." 
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| Flagship Studios' Founder Discusses Its Demise :: money |
| Posted by: Soulskill on 8/19/2008 1:10 PM |
| From the beware-financial-icebergs department. |
| 1Up is running a lengthy interview with Bill Roper, founder of Flagship Studios. The game company, known primarily for its Hellgate: London and Mythos titles, announced massive layoffs last month, and is now simply winding down and taking care of a few final issues. Roper gives quite a bit of detail regarding the financial machinations of a game developer and the current status of the games' code. Co-founders Max Schaefer and Travis Baldree gave a related interview recently as well. "The subscription money we did get, we all poured directly into keeping the game online, keeping it up and running. But the development demands far outstripped the revenues. There just wasn't a good contemplation early on of how that would work. It wasn't like: This is the budget that comes in every month; we'll do whatever we can do with that. We just said [that] development will get done out of the revenues, and whoever pays for development, they get paid back out of the revenues. And there wasn't really enough revenues coming in to cover the expected and required development." 
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| MIT Students' Gag Order Lifted :: court |
| Posted by: kdawson on 8/19/2008 12:22 PM |
| From the common-sense-descends department. |
| mytrip and several other readers let us know that a judge in Boston has lifted the gag order — actually let it expire — against three MIT students who discovered flaws in the security of the local transit system, the MBTA. We've discussed the case over the last 10 days. "Judge O'Toole said he disagreed with the basic premise of the MBTA's argument: That the students' presentation was a likely violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a 1986 federal law meant to protect computers from malicious attacks such as worms and viruses. Many had expected Tuesday's hearing to hinge on First Amendment issues and what amounts to responsible disclosure on the part of computer security researchers. Instead, O'Toole based his ruling on the narrow grounds of what constitutes a violation of the CFAA. On that basis, he said MBTA lawyers failed to convince him on two points: The students' presentation was meant to be delivered to people, and was not a computer-to-computer 'transmission.' Second, the MBTA couldn't prove the students had caused at least $5,000 damage to the transit system." 
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| 139 comments. Read more... |
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| Support Grows For Blanket Music Licensing :: music |
| Posted by: kdawson on 8/19/2008 11:38 AM |
| From the pay-me-once-and-be-done-with-it department. |
| Anti-Globalism sends in Ars coverage of a speech by Jim Griffin, who is a consultant for Warner, one of the big four music labels. Griffin is encouraging dialog on the idea of blanket licensing of music — a topic heretofore more likely to be heard from the EFF or the Barenaked Ladies. "Taking music without paying for it may not be 'morally voluntary,' Griffin says, but he admits it has become 'functionally voluntary.' No civilized society, he adds, can endure 'purely voluntary payment for art, knowledge, and culture.' So Griffin's job is to help Warner monetize digital music, and he's convinced that the issue of payment for music is nothing less than 'our generation's nuclear power.' Griffin's most intriguing idea, and one he's been pitching for some time now, is a voluntary, blanket music license; essentially, bringing the collection society model to end users. In this model, consumers would pay royalties into a pot (by paying an extra monthly fee to their ISPs, for instance) and would then have access to all the music from all the labels that participate in the scheme." 
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| 513 comments. Read more... |
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| Mars Lander Snaps the Most Detailed Pics Yet :: mars |
| Posted by: kdawson on 8/19/2008 10:53 AM |
| From the feeling-its-way department. |
| An anonymous reader writes "The Mars Lander has taken its very first microscopic image of a piece of Martian dust (image). The particle, according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is shown at a higher magnification than anything ever seen from another planet. The piece of dust is a rounded particle about a millionth of a meter across. This particle is one of the countless specks of dust that continually swirl around the Red Planet, coloring the Martian sky pink. 'Taking the images required the highest resolution microscope operated off of Earth and a specially designed substrate to hold the Martian dust,' said Tom Pike, a Phoenix science team member. 'We always knew it was going to be technically very challenging to image particles this small.'" 
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| 112 comments. Read more... |
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| Teens Arrested For Motorized Office Chair :: humor |
| Posted by: samzenpus on 8/19/2008 10:10 AM |
| From the crazyboy department. |
| German police have confiscated the world's fastest office chair and arrested its 17-year-old inventors. The duo added a lawnmower engine, brakes and a metal frame to the office chair and were reported to be driving it all over the streets of Gross-Zimmern. Police did not comment on the chair's handling or acceleration but I look forward to it being profiled on Top Gear. 
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| Leaping the Uncanny Valley :: graphics |
| Posted by: timothy on 8/19/2008 9:19 AM |
| From the compare-this-to-the-final-fantasty-movie department. |
| reachums submits this glance at "the newest level of computer animation," intended to get past the paradoxical "uncanny valley" — that is, the way animated humans actually can appear jarring as the animation gets hyper-realistic. "This short video gives us a glimpse of what we can hope to see in the future of computer games and movies. Emily is not a real actress, but she looks like a real person, something we haven't truly seen before in computer animation." 
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| A Good Reason To Go Full-Time SSL For Gmail :: security |
| Posted by: timothy on 8/19/2008 8:26 AM |
| From the oh-that-hurts department. |
| Ashik Ratnani writes with this snippet from Hungry Hackers: "A tool that automatically steals IDs of non-encrypted sessions and breaks into Google Mail accounts has been presented at the Defcon hackers' conference in Las Vegas. Last week, Google introduced a new feature in Gmail that allows users to permanently switch on SSL and use it for every action involving Gmail, not just authentication. Users who did not turn it on now have a serious reason to do so, as Mike Perry, the reverse engineer from San Francisco who developed the tool, is planning to release it in two weeks." 
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| 494 comments. Read more... |
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| OpenSolaris From a Linux Admin and User Perspective :: unix |
| Posted by: timothy on 8/19/2008 7:34 AM |
| From the looks-quite-nice department. |
| MSa writes "How does OpenSolaris, Sun's effort to free its big-iron OS, fare from a Linux user's point of view? Is it merely a passable curiosity right now, or is it truly worth installing? Linux Format takes OpenSolaris for a test drive, examining the similarities and differences between the OS and a typical Linux distro. If you want to sample the mighty ZFS filesystem, OpenSolaris is definitely the way to go." 
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| 320 comments. Read more... |
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| Open-Source College Textbooks Gaining Mindshare :: education |
| Posted by: timothy on 8/19/2008 6:41 AM |
| From the pirg-nonethless-annoying department. |
| bcrowell writes "The LA Times has a front-page article about how open-source college textbooks are starting to gain traction. One author says, 'I couldn't continue assigning idiotic books that are starting to break $200,' and describes attempts by commercial publishers to bribe faculty to use their books. The Cal State system has started a Digital Marketplace to help faculty find out about their options for free and non-free digital textbooks, and the student group PIRG has collected 1200 faculty signatures on a statement of support for open textbooks." 
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Cached on 8/20/2008 at 11:27:46 AM
