@nthony

'Streaming' search doesn't give a f**k

Google's "Instant" search engine includes a blacklist for words and phrases involving what the company considers "violence, hate, or pornography."…

thelostagency writes "Girish Kumar, managing director of Aiplex Software says his company is being hired by the film industry to attack online pirates. He says if a provider did not do anything to remove the link or content hosted on its site, his company would launch what is known as a denial-of-service (DoS) attack on the offending computer server. From the article: 'Kumar said that at the moment most of the payment for his company's services came from the film industry in India. "We are tied up with more than 30 companies in Bollywood. They are the major production houses." As for Hollywood films, he said they, too, used his services.'"

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Here's an interesting and funny look at 526,000 OkCupid users, divided into groups by race and gender and all the the things each groups says it likes or is interested in. While it is far from being definitive, the groupings give a glimpse of what makes each culture unique. According to the results white men like nothing better than Tom Clancy, Van Halen, and golfing.

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wiedzmin writes "This month, officials from the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), armed with fingerprinting machines, iris scanners and cameras hooked to laptops, will fan out across the towns and villages of southern Andhra Pradesh state in the first phase of the project whose aim is to give every Indian a lifelong Unique ID (UID) number for 'anytime, anywhere' biometric authentication. While enrolling with the UIDAI may be voluntary, other agencies and service providers might require a UID number in order to transact business. Usha Ramanathan, a prominent legal expert who is attached to the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in the national capital, said that, 'taken to its logical limit, the UID project will make it impossible, in a couple of years, for an ordinary citizen to undertake a simple task such as traveling within the country without a UID number.' Next step, tying that UID number and biometric information to to their RIM BlackBerry PIN number."

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AustinSlacker writes "An Iowa school district's lunch program asks children as young as 5 years old to memorize a four-digit PIN code so it can monitor what they eat in the school cafeteria - prompting some parents to claim it's an unhealthy case of 'Big Brother.' An over reaction by parents or an unnecessary invasion of privacy?"

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All Steve Jobs's horses and all Steve Jobs's men ...

Just hours after Apple released iOS 4.1 to great fanfare, hardware hackers found a way to jailbreak devices that run the new operating system. More surprising still, there doesn't appear to be anything Steve Jobs can do to stop them in the near future.…

Free On-Demand Webcast - Virtualizing the Hard Stuff

As the Internet continues to grow, it may be in everyone's best interest to organize how its various parts connect to each other, according to a paper published in Nature Communications. A group of researchers have developed a system that structures the Internet's nodes by coordinates, and allows each node to send information through a short hyperbolic path by knowing only which of its neighboring nodes will get the information closer to its destination. While the theoretical implementation works almost perfectly, the geographical realities of the Internet's arrangement suggest that efficient, scalable arrangements like this one may never come to pass.

The Internet, such as it is, is a series of autonomous systems (AS, not tubes). An individual AS can be viewed as any part of the Internet owned and maintained by a single entity, and can range in size from a single person to AT&T. Connections between autonomous systems are what allow information on the Internet to get around, and a few groups of researchers are beginning to see the disjointed business arrangements between autonomous systems as a potential problem.

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Sergey Brin gets in your head

Analysis  Google is on a mission to make web search as fast as the human brain will allow. On Wednesday morning in San Francisco, as she unveiled Google Instant, a radical overhaul of the company's search engine that updates search results as you type, uber-Googler Marissa Mayer called it "search at the speed of thought." We can safely classify that as an exaggeration for effect, but Mayer's bon mot at least gets to the heart of Google's intentions.…

Sonny Yatsen writes "A new study suggests that the Viking Landers might have found organic compounds on Mars, but failed to recognize them because of the methodology used to detect organics. The findings may suggest specific strategies that would improve on the way organic compounds are detected on the red planet."

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Founders sing a new Songza

Digital music site Amie Street has been bought by Amazon, but the founders of the user-fueled music service aren't abandoning their efforts to bring social networking to music lovers.…

Waledac's 276 domain names seized

A federal magistrate judge has recommended that Microsoft be given ownership of 276 internet addresses used to control “Waledac,” a massive botnet that the software company has been working to bring down.…

Trestles gives Opteron 6100s some love

Appro International, the upstart HPC cluster maker, has got another big order from its biggest customer, the San Diego Supercomputer Center.…

AC95 writes "The FTC wants to give users a browser-based tool for opting out of online behavioral tracking, a proposal that has privacy advocates cheering and online advertisers up in arms. A key issue, says FTC attorney Loretta Garrison, is that while most consumers know they're tracked online, they don't fully appreciate how much information is collected. Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, worries about knee-jerk legislation criminalizing mistakes that are an inherent part of applying any new technology."

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CouchIO no more

NoSQL start-up CouchIO is targeting mobile and clouds after just a year of trying to monetize the company's CouchDB document store.…

Free On-Demand Webcast - Virtualizing the Hard Stuff

An anonymous reader writes "Product placement to promote your brand just isn't enough any more. These days, apparently, some companies are resorting to anti-product placement in order to get competitors' products in the hands of 'anti-stars.' The key example being Snooki from Jersey Shore, who supposedly is being sent handbags by companies... but the bags being sent are of competitors' handbags as a way to avoid Snooki carrying their own handbag, and thus potentially damaging their brand."

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An anonymous reader writes "Swedish researchers have devised a way to turn bioluminescent jellyfish into solar cells. It works like this: the green fluorescent protein (GFP) that makes the Aequorea victoria glow is simply dripped onto a silicon dioxide substrate between two electrodes. The protein works itself into strands between the electrodes. When ultraviolet light is shined on the circuit, voila, the GFP absorbs photons and emits electrons, generating a current. The GFP-powered cells work like dye-sensitized solar cells, but don't require expensive materials such as titanium dioxide."

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The signal problems caused by the iPhone 4's antenna design generated a lot of press, but what affect did the issue have on sales? That's the question that Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster attempted to answer with a survey that he shared in a recent research note. His conclusion: the "antennagate" problem impacted potential sales as much as 20 percent, but that's nothing compared to sales lost because the iPhone is locked exclusively to AT&T.

The survey was conducted on 258 random cell phone users in Minneapolis. Though limiting responses from just one urban area means there could be some bias towards a particular carrier, the respondents were spread across the four major carriers. Among those surveyed, about 30 percent each already used an iPhone, BlackBerry, or "other" phone, while about 10 percent used an Android phone.

Of those surveyed, 69 percent said they were aware of the problems with the iPhone 4 antenna design. That's not surprising given that the issue was widely publicized immediately after the device launched, eventually necessitating a special press conference from Apple to address the problem. However, only 20 percent of those aware of the problem said it negatively impacted their decision to buy one.

A bigger issue, noted Munster, is three times as many respondents brought up the issue that the iPhone isn't available on Verizon—without prompting from the surveyors. "The antenna issue is removing upside potential for iPhone units, but Verizon is actually the most significant factor limiting demand," he wrote.

Though the survey population is somewhat limited, this jibes with what we have heard in and around the Orbiting HQ. When people see me using my iPhone 4 in public, the most common question is, "What is the reception like? I heard the antenna is bad." After discussing the issue, however, the most common conclusion tends to be, "Yeah, I'll probably end up getting one anyway."

In a recent Ars reader poll about Verizon iPhone availability, more than half the respondents that are current AT&T iPhone users would switch to Verizon if the iPhone was available on that carrier. Nearly half the respondents were current Verizon customers that would get an iPhone if it were available. Clearly, breaking free of AT&T's exclusivity could tap a large potential market for new iPhone users.

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itwbennett writes "If Larry Page and Sergey Brin had stuck with the first name for their search engine, we'd be 'BackRubbing' instead of Googling. But the fun doesn't stop there. The unforgettable Go Daddy was first saddled with the eminently Seussian moniker 'Jomax Technologies.' And as for Yahoo!... its original name just rolled off the tongue: 'Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web.'"

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On August 20, Canada's Privy Council Office issued an order targeting Apple and the company's new Canadian version of the iBookstore. Referred to simply as an "order authorizing a review under the Investment Canada Act of Apple Canada, Inc.’s proposed establishment of a new cultural business carried on by iBookstore in Canada," the order means that Apple's investment in Canada will be scrutinized by the government to make sure it aids "Canadian culture."

The decision was noted today by Canadian law professor Michael Geist, and it relies on a section of the Investment Canada Act that allows the government to review investments for "cultural reasons."

The text of the brief order points to section 15 of the Investment Canada Act, which allows the government to review any investment, even those that would not normally be reviewable. The only stipulation is that the investment must concern "a prescribed specific type of business activity that, in the opinion of the Governor in Council, is related to Canada's cultural heritage or national identity."

Given persistent Canadian concerns about being overrun with American TV shows and movies and having the country's digital music market controlled by iTunes, it's clear the government wants to take a closer look at Apple's decision to open a major new e-bookstore in Canada.

Canada's Financial Post took a dim view of the decision, saying that "the government might do well to start the review process by asking the millions of iPod, iPhone and iPad owners of Canada for their views on the matter. Though we all already know what they would say."

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Today 377 members of the European Parliament adopted a written declaration on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in which they demand greater transparency, assert that ISPs should not up end being liable for data sent through their networks, and say that ACTA "should not force limitations upon judicial due process or weaken fundamental rights such as freedom of expression and the right to privacy."

The "written declaration" has no binding force; any MEP can issue one (there's a 200-word maximum), which is adopted when more than half of all MEPs sign on. If adopted, "written declarations are printed and posted on a board at the entrance to the Chambers in Strasbourg and Brussels." They also go up on the Web and get passed on to the European Commission.

But the declaration does give the ACTA negotiators a sense of the parliamentary will; in this case, Parliament has many concerns about both substance and process.

Some of these have already been addressed; the most recent leaked ACTA draft shows that ISP liability has been removed, for instance. Others, like concerns of access to medicines, especially those in transit from countries with looser patent systems, continue to be areas of concern—and have been for some time.

La Quadrature du Net, a French group that heavily backed the declaration, sees it as a sign that ACTA is doomed.

"Written Declaration 12 is a strong political signal sent by the EP to the Commission that ACTA is not tolerable as a way of bypassing democratic processes. Legislation related to Internet, freedom of speech and privacy cannot be negotiated in secrecy under the direct influence of entertainment industry lobbies," said spokesperson Jérémie Zimmermann. "Full rejection of ACTA is the only option."

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