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Submission + - Italian Anonymous Hacker Cell Arrested (google.com)

Submitted by jojo_it
jojo_it writes: Three hackers, part of Anonymous Hacker Group, have been identified and arrested after an Italian-Swiss investigation.
The cell performed several attacks against Italian gov. websites and 'relevant italian companies'.
Censorship

British ISPs Respond On Filtering 163

Posted by Soulskill from the defenders-of-the-porn dept.
An anonymous reader writes "UK ISPs have responded to culture minister Ed Vaisey's comments regarding pervasive, opt-out only porn filtering, bringing up many of the technical and civil-liberties issues also raised on Slashdot. In response to the government proposal, Nicholas Lansman, secretary general of the Ispa industry body, said: 'Ispa firmly believes that controls on children's access to the internet should be managed by parents and carers with the tools ISPs provide, rather than being imposed top-down.' Trefor Davies, chief technology officer at ISP Timico, commented that 'Unfortunately, it's technically not possible to completely block this stuff. You end up with a system that's either hugely expensive and a losing battle because there are millions of these sites or it's just not effective. The cost of putting these systems in place outweigh the benefits, to my mind.' Mr. Davies also feared that any wide-scale attempt to police pornographic content would soon be expanded to include pirated pop songs, films and TV shows. 'If we take this step it will not take very long to end up with an internet that's a walled garden of sites the governments is happy for you to see,' he said."
Open Source

Submission + - Australian stats agency goes open source (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by jimboh2k
jimboh2k writes: The Australian Bureau of Statistics will use the 2011 Census of Population and Housing as a dry run for XML-based open source standards DDI and SDMX in a bid to make for easier machine-to-machine data, allowing users to better search for and access census datasets. The census will become the first time the open standards are used by an Australian Federal Government agency.
Patents

Submission + - Interval's Suit Against the World Dismissed (groklaw.net)

Submitted by randall77
randall77 writes: From Groklaw: Paul Allen's patent infringement complaint against the world and its dog has been dismissed.

Google said the complaint was too vague to meet the standard under Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 129 S. Ct. 1937 (2009) and Bell Atl. Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007). Then, after Interval Licensing brought up the lower patent form standard it thought should apply instead, AOL jumped in saying the complaint was too vague under even that standard, and the court agreed.
The Military

Submission + - Navy tests Mach 8 Electromagnetic Railgun (wired.com)

Submitted by hargrand
hargrand writes: Wired magazine has a story and publicly released video of the Navy test firing of a 32 megajoule electromagnetic railgun.

Reporters were invited to watch the test at the Dalghren Naval Surface Warfare Center. A tangle of two-inch thick coaxial cables hooked up to stacks of refrigerator-sized capacitors took five minutes to power juice into a gun the size of a schoolbus built in a warehouse. With a 1.5-million-ampere spark of light and a boom audible in a room 50 feet away, the bullet left the gun at a speed of Mach 8.

Submission + - Supreme Court refuses P2P "innocent sharing" case (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by yoyo81
yoyo81 writes: The supreme court has refused to hear an "innocent infringement case" in which Whitney Harper shared some music on the family computer when she was a teenager and was subsequently hit with a lawsuit from the RIAA. An appeals court overturned an earlier ruling from a federal court that reduced damages to $200 instead of the statutory $750 claiming "innocence" was no defense, especially since copyright notices appear on all phonorecords. She appealed to the Supreme Court, which refused to hear her case, but Justice Alito stated, "This provision was adopted in 1988, well before digital music files became available on the Internet" and further, "I would grant review in this case because not many cases presenting this issue are likely to reach the Courts of Appeals." For now, though, Harper's verdict remains in place: $750 for each of the 37 songs at issue, or $27,750.
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - Every Day's a Tax Holiday at Amazon

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: With Black Friday approaching, Slate's Farhad Manjoo reminds readers of how Amazon.com undersells Best Buy, the Apple store, and almost everybody else. Read his lips: no sales taxes. Unless you live in KS, KY, NY, ND, or WA, you'll pay no sales tax on many purchases from Amazon, giving Amazon a huge — and largely hidden — price advantage over most other national retailers. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is certainly no fan of taxes — he explored founding Amazon on an Indian reservation, and recently ponied up $100,000 to defeat a proposed WA state income tax, a good investment for someone who's cashed in close to $800,000,000 in Amazon stock this year alone. So, is Amazon's tax-free status unfair? Of course it is, says Manjoo. Amazon has physical operations in 17 states in which the company and its employees enjoy the fruits of local taxes — police and fire protection, roads, hospitals, and other infrastructure that make its operations possible. Yet Amazon skirts tax collection in most of these places through clever legal tricks.
Games

Submission + - Game DLC pricing: Letting customers decide pricing (positech.co.uk)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: How much should game developers be charging for DLC? It seems that one indie dev has decided to carry out a unique experiment. The latest expansion pack for Gratuitous Space Battles is priced at $5.99, or is it? It turns out there is both a standard ($.5.99) version and a discount version ($2.99). And the difference betwen them is.... nothing. The buyer has been left to make their own decision on whether or not they should pay full price, and send more money to the developer, or treat themselves to a deserved discount. The buy page even lists comparisons of national incomes, average salaries and even the price of sausages to help buyers make up their mind. Will this catch on? Will microsoft start asking us whether or not we should get a discount and trust us to answer honestly?

Submission + - Why Twitter's t.co is a game changer (oreilly.com)

Submitted by macslocum
macslocum writes: If Twitter is so inclined, the company could turn the new t.co shortening service into a powerful analytics tool that solves the marketing and tracking issues of off-site engagement.
Government

Submission + - EU Surveillance studies disclosed by Pirate Party

Submitted by Spliffster
Spliffster writes: The German pirate Party has disclosed some secret documents on how the EU is planning to monitor citizens. The so called INDECT Documents describe how a seamless surveillance could (or should) be implemented across Europe. The use of CCTV cameras, the internet (social networks) and even the use of UAV's are mentioned as data sources. Two of the nine documents can be downloaded from the German pirate party's Website (PDFs in english).

Comment Re:So ... the War's Back on Then? (Score 1) 336

by myocardialinfarction (#33502106) Attached to: Sony Releases PS3 Firmware Update To Fight Jailbreaks
"Maybe I'm wrong, but I just don't think humanity is selfless enough to support a thriving software market on the honor system." just about hits the nail on the head for some areas, especially things seen as trivial and non-critical as games. I'd mod up for that if this were really the place for this sort of discussion and I had any mod points.
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - The price of happiness? $75k researchers say... (chicagotribune.com)

Submitted by SpuriousLogic
SpuriousLogic writes: Does happiness rise with income? In one of the more scientific attempts to answer that question, researchers from Princeton have put a price on happiness. It's about $75,000 in income a year.

They found that not having enough money definitely causes emotional pain and unhappiness. But, after reaching an income of about $75,000 per year, money can't buy happiness. More money can, however, help people view their lives as successful or better.

The study found that people's evaluations of their lives improved steadily with annual income. But the quality of their everyday experiences — their feelings — did not improve above an income of $75,000 a year. As income decreased from $75,000, people reported decreasing happiness and increasing sadness, as well as stress. The study found that being divorced, being sick and other painful experiences have worse effects on a poor person than on a wealthier one.

"More money does not necessarily buy more happiness, but less money is associated with emotional pain," the authors wrote. "Perhaps $75,000 is a threshold beyond which further increases in income no longer improve individuals' ability to do what matters most to their emotional well-being, such as spending time with people they like, avoiding pain and disease, and enjoying leisure."

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