Full Tilt poker tycoon arrested by FBI

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4 July 2012
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The gambling tycoon who ran the world’s second largest online poker site from servers in Guernsey has surrendered to the FBI just over a year after the Full Tilt internet address was seized by America’s top white-collar crime prosecutor and the business effectively shut down.

Ray Bitar, chief executive of the Full Tilt group, was arrested on landing at JFK airport. He faces nine charges including bank fraud, money laundering, wire fraud and operating an illegal gambling business — via redwolf.newsvine.com

iGoogle Will Be Discontinued

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4 July 2012
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Google’s personalised homepage will no longer be available starting from November 2013. The official explanation is that with modern apps that run on platforms like Chrome and Android, the need for iGoogle has eroded over time.

iGoogle started as a custom Google homepage that allowed you to add gadgets for weather, news, mail and more. The goal of this initiative is to bring together Google functionality, and content from across the web, in ways that are useful to our users, explained Google in 2005 — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive Emails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant

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4 July 2012
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Analysing one of American corporate history’s greatest mysteries — the lost decade of Microsoft — two-time George Polk Award winner Kurt Eichenwald traces the astonishingly foolish management decisions at the company that could serve as a business-school case study on the pitfalls of success. Relying on dozens of interviews and internal corporate records—including e-mails between executives at the company’s highest ranks — Eichenwald offers an unprecedented view of life inside Microsoft during the reign of its current chief executive, Steve Ballmer. Today, a single Apple product — the iPhone — generates more revenue than all of Microsoft’s wares combined — via Vanity Fair

Twitter ordered to hand over Occupy tweets

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3 July 2012
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A US court has ordered Twitter to release old messages and details about a user arrested during an Occupy Wall Street protest in New York.

The micro-blogging firm contested the subpoena, saying the tweets were owned by users rather than the company.

But a judge said defendant Malcolm Harris’ privacy would not be violated if the material was handed over.

Earlier, the American Civil Liberties Union commended Twitter for defending free speech rights.

If you post a tweet, just like if you scream it out the window, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy, Judge Matthew Sciarrino wrote in his decision.

Nevertheless, the judge said he would personally review the information and would only release the relevant sections to prosecution and defence lawyers — via redwolf.newsvine.com

EFA welcomes inclusion of ‘fair use’ in Copyright Review

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2 July 2012
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Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) welcomes the decision by the Attorney-General to include consideration of the doctrine of fair use of copyright material in the final terms of reference for the Australian Law Reform Commission’s (ALRC) Review of the Copyright Act in the digital environment.

EFA was one of a number of advocacy groups that sent submissions to the Attorney-General calling for consideration of the doctrine of fair use to be included in the ALRC review — via redwolf.newsvine.com

GPS Alternative Developed By Defense Firm BAE Systems

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2 July 2012
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UK defence firm BAE Systems has developed a new positioning system that uses existing transmissions such as Wi-Fi, TV, radio and mobile phone signals to calculate the user’s location to within a few metres.

The technology is being touted as a replacement for current technologies such as GPS, which relies upon a relatively weak satellite signal that is vulnerable to disruption.

Known as Navigation via Signals of Opportunity (NAVSOP), BAE Systems’ new system is resistant to hostile interference such as jamming and spoofing, and can learn from signals that are initially unidentified to build a more accurate and reliable fix on its location.

NAVSOP can function in places where GPS is unable to reach, such as dense urban areas and deep inside buildings, and can work in remote parts of the world, such as the Arctic, by picking up signals that include Low-Earth-Orbit satellites and other civilian signals.

It can also be integrated into existing positioning devices to to improve the performance of GPS, according to BAE Systems — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Plastic Logic demos colour video animation on electronic paper

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30 June 2012
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Plastic electronics company Plastic Logic has demonstrated colour video animation on a flexible plastic display, which it claims is the first example of an organic thin-film transistor (OTFT) driving electronic paper at video rate.

The demonstration proves that the potential uses of electronic paper extend far beyond monochrome text-based e-readers to more sophisticated tablet-style devices that can run colour video, while still keeping power consumption low — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Mega-victory: Kim Dotcom search warrants ‘invalid’ mansion raid ‘illegal’

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28 June 2012
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On 20 January, New Zealand police showed up in style at the mansion of flamboyant Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, swarming over the property and bringing along two police helicopters. They cut their way through locks and into the home’s panic room, where Dotcom was hiding in apparent fear of a kidnapping or robbery. They seized 18 luxury vehicles. They secured NZ$11 million in cash from bank accounts. And they grabbed a whopping 150TB of data from Dotcom’s many digital devices.

It was definitely not as simple as knocking at the front door, said Detective Inspector Grant Wormald in a police press release at the time.

It was also totally illegal. That’s the ruling of New Zealand High Court judge Helen Winkelmann, who today ripped the “invalid” warrant and the subsequent search and seizure in a 56-page decision.

The ruling marks a major win for the Kim Dotcom defence, which is trying to prevent their client from being extradited to the US on a host of copyright and money laundering charges. Still, it’s not yet clear if Dotcom will actually get his data back; the FBI already flew to New Zealand, imaged much of the data in March, and FedExed it back to the US — via Ars Technica

EFA welcomes Parliamentary recommendation to not ratify ACTA

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28 June 2012
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EFA welcomes the recommendation from the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties (JSCOT) of the Federal Parliament that Australia should not ratify the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) at this time.

EFA Secretary Kim Heitman said, The Committee is to be congratulated for its astute assessment that the ACTA treaty should not be ratified while debate rages in Europe and the US on its terms. In particular, the requirements that member countries introduce draconian provisions criminalising normal Internet users and refrain from expanding fair usage rights are contrary to the public interest and the economic interests of Australians.

EFA believes that the Committee were correct in rejecting the assertion from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) that the ACTA treaty would not require changes to Australian law. While the final text was bland, in the light of the High Court decision in the iiNet case, the international interests that drive these discussions will push for Australia to introduce legislation to impose a graduated response (“three strikes”) punishment for downloaders — via redwolf.newsvine.com

NBN impasse sees town stuck with satellite

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27 June 2012
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NBN Co will only offer satellite services to residents in the regional town of Napoleons, after the Golden Plains Shire Council rejected the company’s plans for a tower to deliver fixed-wireless LTE services in the area.

NBN Co had eight proposals for 40-metre towers before the Golden Plains Shire Council in regional Victoria, and although the council has approved six so far, it was the first council to reject a National Broadband Network (NBN) tower on 21 May 2012, stating that the planned tower for Napoleons would have a big visual impact on the area.

An alternative arrangement could not be reached between NBN Co and the council, and, subsequently, NBN Co has said that the residents in Napoleons will get NBN Co’s satellite service instead. The news was first reported by The Courier — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Telstra logs customer history for new filter

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27 June 2012
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Telstra has admitted to tracking the websites visited by Next G mobile customers, as part of the development of a voluntary internet filtering system.

The tracking was first picked up by members of the Australian Network Operators group, who noticed that requests made to a web server from port 80 on a Telstra mobile device, would immediately be followed by a request from an IP address in the US, hosted by Rackspace.

After inquiries on the anomaly by ZDNet Australia, Telstra today came clean and admitted that it is working on a new cybersafety tool called Smart Controls, that will block certain sites from appearing on Telstra mobiles that are signed up for the service — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Winamp’s woes: how the greatest MP3 player undid itself

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26 June 2012
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MP3s are so natural to the Internet now that it’s almost hard to imagine a time before high-quality compressed music. But there was such a time — and even after MP3entered the mainstream, organising, ripping, and playing back one’s music collection remained a clunky and frustrating experience.

Enter Winamp, the skin-able, customizable MP3 player that really whips the llama’s ass” In the late 1990s, every music geek had a copy; llama-whipping had gone global, and the big-money acquisition offers quickly followed. AOL famously acquired the company in June 1999 for $80-$100 million — and Winamp almost immediately lost its innovative edge.

Winamp’s 15-year anniversary is now upon us, with little fanfare. It’s almost as if the Internet has forgotten about the upstart with the odd slogan that looked at one time like it would be the company to revolutionise digital music. It certainly had the opportunity.

There’s no reason that Winamp couldn’t be in the position that iTunes is in today if not for a few layers of mismanagement by AOL that started immediately upon acquisition, Rob Lord, the first general manager of Winamp, and its first-ever hire, told Ars — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Carat: Collaborative Energy Debugging

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26 June 2012
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Carat is a research project that aims to detect energy bugs — app behaviour that is consuming energy unnecessarily — using data collected from a community of mobile devices. After running Carat for about a week, you will start to receive personalized recommendations for improving your battery life. We are based out of the AMP Lab in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley, collaborating with the University of Helsinki

Error 451: This Page Has Been Burned

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26 June 2012
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Earlier this month Google developer advocate Tim Bray proposed a new HTTP Error status code aimed at shining a light on web censorship.

Bray’s new Error 451 would work somewhat like the Error 404 pages you’ve probably seen. But instead of telling you that the page could not be found, an Error 451 response would let you know that the page you were looking for had been censored.

The number is a tribute to author Ray Bradbury (commenters on a Slashdot thread independently suggested 451 as well).

As it stands, most web-blocking tools return a 403 error (which means access is forbidden) when denying access to censored pages. For instance, UK ISPs, which are now required to block The Pirate Bay, typically return a 403 error code when doing so — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Microsoft buys Yammer in $1.2bn cash deal

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26 June 2012
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The rumours were true: Microsoft has acquired business social networking firm Yammer in a 1.2bn cash deal announced on Monday.

The acquisition of Yammer adds best-in-class enterprise social networking to Microsoft’s growing portfolio of complementary cloud services; world-class talent that knows how to deliver rapid innovation in the cloud; and a unique adoption model that appeals directly to end users, said Redmond in a statement.

Yammer, a messaging and microblog network with a lot of customers in the top end of enterprise, has a market Microsoft needs. Redmond has traditionally been shy of social networking, but Yammer could be a useful tool in to integrate into Windows 8 and other platforms — via redwolf.newsvine.com

‘Twisted light’ carries 2.5 terabits of data per second

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25 June 2012
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Researchers have clocked light beams made of twisted waves carrying 2.5 terabits of data — the capacity of more than 66 DVDs — per second.

The technique relies on manipulating what is known as the orbital angular momentum of the waves.

Recent work suggests that the trick could vastly boost the data-carrying capacity in wi-fi and optical fibres.

The striking demonstration of the approach, reported in Nature Photonics, is likely to lead to even higher rates — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Lego Turing Machine / Jeroen van den Bos + Davy Landman

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25 June 2012
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This is a short documentary about the Lego Turing Machine built by Jeroen van den Bos and Davy Landman at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam (Netherlands). They built it for CWI’s exposition Turings Erfenis in honour of the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth on 23 June 1912.

Alan Turing was a brilliant mathematician who helped define the theoretical model of the computer as we know it today. He was a visionary, one of the few people of his time who recognised the role the computer would play for humanity.

The Turing Machine (1936) is an adequate model of a computer. It can do anything the computers of today or tomorrow can do.

EFF Will Represent The Oatmeal Creator in Fight Against Bizarre Lawsuit Targeting Critical Online Speech

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22 June 2012
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is joining with attorney Venkat Balasubramani of the law firm Focal PLLC to represent The Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman in a bizarre lawsuit targeting the online comic strip’s fundraising campaign in support of the American Cancer Society and the National Wildlife Federation.

I have a right to express my opinion, whether Mr Carreon likes it or not, said Inman. While the lawsuit may be silly, the harm it can do is very real — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Drobo embraces Thunderbolt, releases Drobo Mini

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22 June 2012
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Drobo today announced a new form factor for its backup storage array and for the first time you can carry this one around. It also announced the Drobo 5D array, with up to 20TB capacity and six times the performance of its predecessor.

Along with two new data backup devices, the company announced support on its products for the Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 external device interconnect specifications.

Drobo’s first portable array, the Drobo Mini, holds up to four 2-in. to 5-in. drives and weighs only about 2.5 pounds. It can store up to 3TB of data. The Mini will retail for about $599 without drives and support both Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Google ‘to save endangered languages’

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21 June 2012
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Google has launched a new website in a bid to save endangered languages from disappearing forever.

Called ‘The Endangered Languages Project’, the search giants hopes by using technology to encourage collaboration between people familiar with the languages at risk and providing a comprehensive database, it will help preserve these historical words.

Today we’re introducing something we hope will help [preserve languages on the brink of disappearing]: the Endangered Languages Project, a website for people to find and share the most up-to-date and comprehensive information about endangered languages, wrote Clara Rivera Rodriguez and Jason Rissman, project managers of Google’s Endangers Languages Project, on the company blog — via The Telegraph

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