Maybe you're a college student. Maybe you're one of America's vast numbers of un- and under-employed workers. Maybe you're simply frugal.
There's a phenomenon that economists describe as a "race to the bottom," where vendors compete by undercutting in price, which leads to a reduction in quality and service.
Perhaps it was an omen of what was to come when the city of San Francisco on New Year's Eve 2010 couldn't get a backup system running in its Emergency Operations Center because no one knew the password.
If nothing else, the now disputed "hacking" of an Illinois water utility has brought the spotlight back to shine on the vulnerability of our national infrastructure.
If you rarely stray from Wi-Fi network areas and you're sick of high cell phone bills, you may find this new $19-a-month wireless service a very attractive proposition.
A U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee has approved legislation that would provide funding for a nationwide mobile broadband network for public safety...
VirtualSharp hopes to soon let its customers set up disaster recovery plans that fail over from their private clouds to public clouds, the company announced this...
In a perfect world, wireless carriers would respond to the discovery of Carrier IQ with straight answers.
An updated Linux kernel and new bundled software star in the first alpha release of this upcoming operating system.
My CPU beats your CPU with this card game idea that's up for funding on Kickstarter.
Attention DIY fans: Get the official 1.0 release of the Arduino software and development tools.
Sprint Nextel may help finance Clearwire's LTE network and keep offering WiMax service through 2015 under a set of agreements worth as much as US$1.6 billion...
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has invited questions about its impartiality with a staff report laying out concerns about AT&T's proposed mobile carrier T-Mobile USA, AT&T said Thursday.
Google's open-source Android 4.0 operating system for smartphones and tablets has been ported to work with x86 processors, a member of an open-source project...
This pinball machine combines pinball, gumball, and baseball. Want.
Microsoft's declaration this week that Office 365 is enjoying unprecedented levels of sales success didn't fully convince some industry experts who were...
Check out this time-lapse of a special-editing Starcraft battlecruiser kit from MegaBlocks being assembled.
The Shopycat app runs Facebook information through Walmart's Social Genome technology and then matches the keywords that process provides with gift suggestions.
For the new release of its WebLogic, Oracle has tailored the enterprise Java application server so that it can be used more easily in cloud deployments.
A recent "hack" against an Illinois water utility turned out to not be an attack at all, but security experts warn that municipal utilities and other critical networks are at risk and need better security.
A Japanese Spandex manufacturer produces the world’s first elastic USB cable that can stretch 1.5 times its original size.
A Mozilla engineering manager has proposed that the company pull the plug on Mac OS X 10.5 in six months.
Cisco Systems in the first half of next year will release a tablet with a larger screen than the current Cius, the first move in the company's long-term plans to...
Ed Markey says Amazon's responses to his inquiries do not provide enough detail about how the company intends to use customer information gathered via Silk.
New browser market share stats show Internet Explorer as a whole is flat, but Internet Explorer 9 continues to gain traction and is on pace to be the number one browser on Windows 7.
A survey from ChangeWave Research found that 96 percent of respondents were somewhat or very satisfied with their device, but 38 percent of those people said the phone's battery life was too short.
The tablet's svelte design, speedy performance via the Nvidia Tegra 3 quad-core processor and camera quality got high marks.
The Witcher 2 developer estimates game has been illegally downloaded millions of times, but says DRM isn't the solution.
Europe’s pirate party member of parliament has warned that a new funding package for IT innovation could seriously damage open source development.
Web analytics firm StatCounter says Chrome remains in third place in the United States but it is on track to overtake Firefox.
Carrier IQ's software is on more than 140 million handsets worldwide. So is it tracking Android and BlackBerry user data?
WikiLeaks on Thursday released a broad study of the brisk global trade in surveillance products, which founder Julian Assange [cq] claimed exposes a broad risk...
Renesas Electronics will upgrade its Japanese factories so that they can be up and running within a month after a major quake like the one that struck Japan in...
Vodafone's Global Enterprise is strengthening its professional services arm by acquiring British consultant Bluefish Communications, which will form the basis of...
Sharp on Thursday announced a camera module for smartphones that shoots 12.1 megapixels and is just 5.47-mm (0.22 inches) thick, which it says is the thinnest in...
If you need a bone, 3D-printed scaffold replacements may be around in the next 1-2 decades.
Walmart has launched its Shopycat application, that uses information on the interests of friends on Facebook to make recommendations on gifts for them from...
AT&T and China Telecom signed an agreement on Wednesday to share telecommunications infrastructure across the U.S. and China, in a move meant to help their...
Alibaba Group said it has not decided to be part of a bid for the whole of Yahoo, countering reports that the Chinese company is in talks with private equity...
See today's roundup of stories we weren't quite able to get to. Insert your own pithy joke here.
A Google executive refuted recent comments from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who said Microsoft wins enterprise cloud contracts 98 percent of the time when up...
UPDATED x2: Millions of phones may be at risk from a secret data logging software that's on nearly every Android, Blackberry, and Nokia phone out there, according to a researcher. References to it also reportedly found in iOS.
Qbo the robot looks at a mirror to identify and learns that it is looking at itself.
A new device allows you to jump from one world to another through a portal and interact with others on the other side of the planet.
Designed specifically with Mac OS X in mind, this Firefox cousin just got a major upgrade. Here are five reasons to check it out.
The free lunch may be over for Netflix and Hulu Plus users.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission adopted rules at a meeting on Wednesday to allow wireless networks of microstimulators designed to treat paralysis and...
Several members of the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee voiced support Wednesday for legislation that would allow states to collect sales tax on...
Netflix designed its cloud architecture so that it has the option to move to an Amazon Web Services competitor, but doesn't expect a real competitor to emerge...
The latest Kindle Fire software update removes root access from the device.
Trailrunner7 writes "A group of researchers is claiming that they've found a root exploit that enables them to jailbreak the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet made by Research In Motion. In a video demonstration of the jailbreak, one of the researchers shows off the ability to change the settings on a PlayBook and says that he also has the ability to install the Android Market app on the tablet."
ChristW writes "Remember OpenMoko's first free and open source phones, the GTA-01 and GTA-02 (also called FreeRunner)? There is a new project called Phoenux. The German company Golden Delicous is building a new main board (called GTA-04) for the GTA01/02 case. The new hardware features a DM3730 (800 MHz) processor, a GTM601W UMTS (HSPA) module, and lots more." Would you pay extra for a phone that comes with a Debian build?
First time accepted submitter treellama writes "Nearly 12 year since Bungie released the source code for Marathon 2, the Aleph One team is thrilled to release version 1.0 of the Aleph One game engine. Aleph One is a Free software, cross platform game engine that supports all three original Marathon games with enhancements such as OpenGL and Internet play; as well as numerous third party mods known as 'scenarios.' Easy to install full versions of Marathon, Marathon 2, and Marathon Infinity, now featuring high resolution graphics and modern widescreen HUD support, can be downloaded for free from the project website!"
JoeRobe writes "Researchers at Harvard have developed a pneumatically-controlled rubber robot that combines undulation and quadrupedal 'crawling,' allowing it to maintain a low profile while moving. In a paper published in PNAS (abstract), they describe it as a 'soft robot, composed exclusively of soft materials (elastomeric polymers), which is inspired by animals (e.g., squid, starfish, worms) that do not have hard internal skeletons.' The robot is solely powered by relatively low pressure (10 psi), and controlled by 5 pneumatic actuators. The research was funded by DARPA." The paper is also available (not paywalled) from the researchers' project site (PDF), complete with more creepy images of the squidbot.
jrepin writes "Global Chokepoints is an online resource created to document and monitor global proposals to turn Internet intermediaries into copyright police. These proposals harm Internet users' rights of privacy, due process and freedom of expression, and endanger the future of the free and open Internet. Our goal is to provide accurate empirical information to digital activists and policy makers, and help coordinate international opposition to attempts to cut off free expression through misguided copyright laws, policies, agreements and court cases. Scroll down to see a list of countries currently featured for threatening free expression through copyright censorship."
itwbennett writes "Last month two Red Hat developers proposed to replace the 30-year-old syslog system with a new Journal daemon. Initial reaction was mostly negative and 'focused on the Journal's use of a binary key-value form of data to log system events,' says blogger Brian Proffit. But now, says Proffitt, it seems that the proposal to replace syslog has less to do with the fixing syslog's problems than with Red Hat's desire to go its own way with Linux infrastructure."
New submitter Juggler00 writes "I have been running DD-WRT (v24-sp2) on my Linksys WRT54GS for a couple of years now. I'm now finding that the box cannot keep up with the requests/requirements I have for it--it simply does not have the MIPS/horsepower. I am turning to the collective wisdom of the Slashdot community for 2 things: what alternative firmware should I be using (DD-WRT, Tomato, OpenWRT, or something else?) and based on the answer to this question, what is the suggested router to purchase to flash? My software requirements include DynDNS client, DHCP server providing option 66, static IP assignment based on MAC, port forwarding, and basic QoS (bittorrent lowest priority). For hardware, I'm looking for GigE ports and 802.11N (5.8GHz not a requirement)."
Freddybear writes "Digital forensics experts at Dartmouth have developed software that can analyze digital photos to rate how drastically they have been altered by digital editing techniques. 'The Dartmouth research, said Seth Matlins, a former talent agent and marketing executive, could be "hugely important" as a tool for objectively measuring the degree to which photos have been altered.'"
adeelarshad82 writes "Researchers at MIT have developed an algorithm that determines which drivers will run a red light, within one to two seconds before a potential collision. The research, based on 15,000 cars at a busy intersection, monitored various factors to determine which cars were were likely to run a red light. They found that their predictions were correct about 85 percent of the time, which is about 15-20 percent better than existing traffic prediction algorithms."
Hugh Pickens writes writes "After San Francisco enacted the nation's strictest regulations on composting in 2009, the city has increased the amount of food scraps and plant cuttings it composts to more than 600 tons per day, more than any other city in North America, and recently celebrated the collection one million tons of organic materials. Other cities have been watching as Seattle passed a similar mandate in 2010 diverting about 90,000 tons of organic waste from landfills in the first year and New York City is trying to figure out how to implement this type of program for its 8 million residents. The impact is potentially huge in terms of reducing the load on landfills as a study by San Francisco's Department of Environment shows that more than one third of all waste entering landfills could be composted instead. "We want to see composting be a standard for everybody," says Michael Virga, executive director of the U.S. Composting Council. "Urban, suburban, it doesn't really matter where you are." Although composting initially costs more than land-filling, over the long-term, the benefits will outweigh the costs. "We can reduce a large source of landfill-generated greenhouse gases, extend the life of our landfill, and generate a valuable resource for the community in the form of premium soil and mulch," writes Shanon Boase. "What's more, this industry generates additional jobs.""
itwbennett writes "WikiLeaks has launched a new submissions platform, along with a study of the global trade in surveillance products. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told press conference attendees in London that all the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Gmail users in the crowd were 'screwed.' 'The reality is intelligence contractors are selling right now to countries across the world mass surveillance systems for all of those products,' Assange said."
MojoKid writes "NVIDIA's new Tegra 3 SoC (System on a Chip) has recently been released for performance reviews in the Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime Android tablet. Tegra 3 is comprised of a quad-core primary CPU complex with a 5th companion core for lower-end processing requirements and power management. The chip can scale up to 1.4GHz on a single core and 1.3GHz on up to four of its cores, while the companion core operates at 500MHz. It makes for a fairly impressive new tablet platform and offers performance that bests Apple's A5 dual-core processor in more than a few tests. The Asus Eee Pad Transformer Prime with optional keyboard dock and NVIDIA's Tegra 3 is set to be available in volume sometime around December 19th."
New submitter black6host writes with this interesting snippet from Space.com: "NASA is playing with fire on the International Space Station — literally. Since March 2009, the space agency's Flame Extinguishment Experiment, or FLEX, has conducted more than 200 tests to better understand how fire behaves in microgravity, which is still not well understood. The research could lead to improved fire suppression systems aboard future spaceships, and it could also have practical benefits here on Earth, scientists said."
New submitter Howard Beale writes with this excerpt from The Verge: "To date, the user tracking controversy surrounding Carrier IQ has focused primarily on Android, but today details are surfacing that the company also may have hooks into Apple's iOS. Well-known iPhone hacker Chpwn tweeted today that versions at least as recent as iPhone OS 3.1.3 contained references to Carrier IQ and later confirmed it's in all versions of iOS, including iOS 5." The details are still emerging; however, iPhone users will be happy to hear that while it's reported that the software is available to the OS, "the good news is that it does not appear to actually send any information so long as a setting called DiagnosticsAllowed is set to off, which is the default."
Alioth writes "The BBC has an article on the BBC Microcomputer, designed and manufactured by Acorn Computers for the BBC's Computer Literacy project. It is now 30 years since the first BBC Micro came out — a machine with a 2 MHz 6502 — remarkably fast for its day; the Commodore machines at the time only ran at 1MHz. While most U.S. readers will never have heard of the BBC Micro, the BBC's Computer Literacy project has had a huge impact worldwide since the ARM (originally meaning 'Acorn Risc Machine') was designed for the follow-on version of the BBC Micro, the Archimedes, also sold under the BBC Microcomputer label by Acorn. The original ARM CPU was specified in just over 800 lines of BBC BASIC. The ARM CPU now outsells all other CPU architectures put together. The BBC Micro has arguably been the most influential 8 bit computer the world had thanks to its success creating the seed for the ARM, even if the 'Beeb' was not well known outside of the UK."