CWmike writes "Hewlett-Packard is reported to be suing former CEO Mark Hurd, who was named co-president of rival Oracle on Monday. The Wall Street Journal first reported the news, and has now posted the full text of the suit on Google Docs. Among other things, it says, 'In his new positions, Hurd will be in a situation in which he cannot perform his duties for Oracle without necessarily using and disclosing HP's trade secrets and confidential information to others.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Photovoltaic cells are becoming cheaper and more efficient each year, but there are still some questions regarding their long-term sustainability. Most technologies involve the use of elements that may be limited in supply, toxic, expensive, and difficult to recycle, which may ultimately limit our ability to produce them on the sorts of scales that a wholly renewable energy economy would require. One possible alternative to the traditional hardware is the use of biological materials, which are invariably comprised of abundant elements, and are produced in bulk by organisms simply as part of their normal life. The main downside of biologicals has been that they're far less stable than solid-state devices, which can last for decades. But a study released by Nature Chemistry indicates that it's possible to use an organism's own self-repair systems to keep proteins operating long past the end of their normal lifespan.

Compared to some of the best devices on the market today, the systems cells used to harvest sunlight during photosynthesis aren't very efficient. But they do have two major advantages. Since life evolved to rely on some of the most abundant elements around—primarily carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen—producing more of them and recycling damaged components is incredibly simple. It also partially eliminates the manufacturing issues, since bacteria will happily pump out more of the light-harvesting proteins each time they divide. That doesn't mean there's a requirement for some hardware to support the proteins, but this is generally simpler and cheaper than the hardware used to harvest light.

Read the comments on this post

eldavojohn writes "For decades, Stanford has been working on a different kind of Wikipedia. It might even be considered closer to a peer-reviewed journal, since you have get submissions past a 120 person group of leading philosophers around the world, not to mention Stanford's administration. It has several layers of approval, but the authoritative model produces high quality content — even if it only amounts to 1,200 articles. Content you can read straight through to find everything pertinent — not hop around following link after link like the regular Wikipedia. You might question the need for this, but one of the originators says, 'Our model is authoritative. [Wikipedia's] model is one an academic isn't going to be attracted to. If you are a young academic, who might spend six months preparing a great article on Thomas Aquinas, you're not going to publish in a place where anyone can come along and change this.' The site has articles covering topics from Quantum Computing to technical luminaries like Kurt Friedrich Gödel and Alan Turing. The principal editor said, 'It's the natural thing to do. I'm surprised no one is doing it for the other disciplines.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tommy Christopher, who writes for mediate.com, has reporting in his blood, so much so that he livetweeted every part of his recent heart attack. "I gotta be me. Livetweeting my heart attack. Beat that!" and "This is not like the movies. Most deadpan heart attack evar. Still hurts even after the morphine," were among his updates as he was rushed to the hospital. Christopher is now in stable condition after recovering from emergency surgery.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) got a bit more transparent this year, as negotiators held a few meetings with civil society types and released one official draft text some months ago. But this wouldn't be ACTA without secret meetings and unreleased draft texts, would it?

This isn't a serious problem for those who want to read the draft texts after each negotiating session; leaks have become routine, which made this week's leak (PDF) of the most recent draft text so unsurprising. At this late stage in the negotiations, after so much criticism in the US and Europe, one might expect ACTA negotiators to operate as transparently as they have promised to do. Unfortunately, the US stands in the way.

We've seen reports for months that the US contingent was one of the strongest pro-secrecy voices among the negotiators from the EU, Korea, Japan, Mexico, Canada, Australia, and other countries, but EU sources are now confirming it. According to EurActiv, EU policy sources say that "American officials blocked European attempts to publish the latest draft of the global Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) on an EU website after a Washington-based round of negotiations in August."

Apart from the occasional letter, Congress has little interest in ACTA; the EU Parliament, by contrast, has made far more noise, demanding more briefings and more deference from the European Commission which is negotiating the deal. But the European Commission briefed European members of parliament that after this year's round of negotiations in Lucerne, the meeting remained secret—so Pirate MEP Christian Engström left. He didn't even bother to attend the most recent briefing, which was also secret.

As for the content of the most recent draft, it's much the same as previous drafts. The truly substantive change came from the US, which has backed off on some of its demands for secondary liability that could implicate ISPs when users do bad things online.

Looking through the text, it's clear that divisions remain, including some major ones; the EU still demands that its geographical marks (like "Champagne" or "Parmigiano-Reggiano") receive protection from ACTA countries, while most other negotiators want to limit the text to copyrights and counterfeits. KEI, which obtained the most recent leak, has a nice rundown of its changes.

But most of the major issues are settled, and ACTA certainly seems on track for completion by year's end.

Read the comments on this post

RyuuzakiTetsuya writes "Destructoid is reporting that the 3.42 firmware has been released for the PlayStation 3, and it has fixed the USB vulnerability that allows the PSJailbreak exploit to work." Sony's brief announcement of the update refers only to "additional security features," though the EU blog post acknowledges that a vulnerability was addressed. PS3-Hacks.com confirms that the patch is effective against the various jailbreak tools, and they point out a different tool for bypassing the update. Sony told the BBC, "... as we always have, we will continue to take necessary actions to both hardware and software to protect the intellectual content provided on the PlayStation 3."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

kkleiner writes "The latest in a line of 'modsnakes' from Carnegie Mellon's Biorobotics Lab, Uncle Sam can move in a variety of different ways, including rolling, wiggling, and side-winding. It can also wrap itself around a pole and climb vertically, and even scale a tree. You have to watch this thing in action. There is something incredibly life-like and eerie about the way it scales the tree outdoors and then looks around with its camera 'eye.' Projects like Uncle Sam show how life-mimicking machines could revolutionize robotics in the near future."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Trailrunner7 writes "The United States has a responsibility to take a leadership role in securing the Internet against both internal and external attackers, a duty that the federal government takes very seriously, the country's top military cybersecurity official said Tuesday. However, Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency and commander of the US Cyber Command, provided virtually nothing in the way of details of how the government intends to accomplish this rather daunting task. 'We made the Internet and it seems to me that we ought to be the first folks to get out there and protect it,' Alexander said. 'The challenge before us is large and daunting. But we have an obligation to meet it head-on.' It's unlikely that any of Alexander's comments Tuesday will do much to quiet the criticisms of the Obama administration's security efforts thus far. Speaking mostly in generalities, Alexander emphasized the administration's commitment to the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, a plan developed by the Bush administration and recently partially de-classified by Obama administration officials."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sweden's Frederick Ingblad is a specialized intellectual property prosecutor, and this morning he made a very specialized announcement: at the request of Belgian authorities, Ingbland and Swedish police had just made a series of coordinated raids on ISPs and universities. Their target: "The Scene."

For two years, Belgium has been looking into the online operations that obtain, crack, and distribute software, games, and media, operations collectively referred to as The Scene. Ingblad targeted several ISPs, Umeå University, and sites in Malmo and Eslöv. The ISP raids were to gain information on particular IP addresses (Sweden has a recent law requiring ISPs to retain more information on their users for just such cases), but some of the other raids were actually made to scoop up individuals. Four people have been detained, along with servers and personal computers.

Read the comments on this post

A recent NYT piece explores the never-ending quest for password-based security, to which reader climenole responds with a snippet from ReadWriteWeb that argues it's time to think more seriously about life beyond passwords, at least beyond keeping a long list of individual login/password pairs: "These protective measures don't go very far, according to the New York Times, because hackers can get ahold of passwords with software that remotely tracks keystrokes, or by tricking users into typing them in. The story touches on a range of issues around the problem, but neglects to mention the obvious: the march toward a centralized login for multiple sites."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Barence writes "The United Arab Emirates has its own Chinese-style firewall to weed out pornography and other 'unsavory' content. But as PC Pro's correspondent has found out, the firewall has more than a few holes in it. ISP helplines routinely suggest proxy server software that circumvents the filters. Access to Flickr is blocked, in case citizens' eyes should fall upon a naked buttock, but The Pirate Bay, which 'offers a range of bottoms to suit every need, including midget and donkey bottoms for anybody having a really slow afternoon – remains blissfully undisturbed.' 'Ultimately, I'm quite glad the UAE's authorities block websites, and thrilled that they're so inept at it,' concludes PC Pro's writer. 'Just like everybody in Dubai, all they've done is made me a master of internet chicanery.'" Guess that depends how closely they're watching the evaders.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

To the shock of absolutely no one, Sony has announced a new mandatory update for the PlayStation 3. Don't expect any new features, but if you have one of those new, fancy USB-based hacking devices you may want to hold off on updating. Just sayin'.

"Hi everyone! A minor update to your PS3 system is now available via system software update v3.42 that includes additional security features," Sony's Director of Hardware Marketing wrote on the official blog. "For more details and instructions on how to update the system software for the PS3 system, please visit the PS3 System Updates page."

Ah, the mandatory updates, who doesn't love them? This is Sony's way of blessing everyone who bought a PlayStation 3 with the gift of annoyance. We'll see how long it takes for another fix from the hacking community, which will be met with yet another firmware patch. This is like your parents fighting: you may not be involved, but you're still stuck in the middle and suffering for it.

Read the comments on this post

The Samsung Galaxy S is coming to Verizon's network this week in the form of the Samsung Fascinate. The latest in the Galaxy S smartphone line will be available Wednesday online and Thursday in Verizon Wireless retail stores nationwide. Unlike other Android phones from HTC and Motorola, though, the Fascinate doesn't carry Verizon's Droid branding.

The internal hardware of the Fascinate is identical to other Galaxy S smartphones, including a 1GHz Hummingbird ARM processor, 4" Super AMOLED touchscreen, 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth, and a 5MP autofocus camera with 720p video recording. It's also powered by Android 2.1 and comes with the innovative Swype keyboard as the default.

The main difference between the Fascinate and other Galaxy S variants launched on AT&T and T-Mobile is the cosmetic appearance—which looks quite nice in the photos we have seen so far—and the bundled apps. VCAST will be featured over Amazon MP3 for OTA music downloads, along with a VCAST-branded music identification app. Verizon Navigator will also come preloaded; Google Navigation will need to be downloaded via Android Marketplace if you'd prefer that option. Other preloaded apps include the exclusives NFL Mobile and Blockbuster, as well as Skype Mobile and Amazon Kindle.

The Samsung Fascinate costs $199.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate with a two-year contract. Plans including voice and data start at $70 per month.

Read the comments on this post

We watch more than 2 billion YouTube videos every day, but let's admit it -- we're usually viewing a top 25 clip, a video forwarded by a friend or an old standby like David After Dentist (some of those 66 million views must be repeats).

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has reiterated the company's plans to release its TV product in the US this fall. Schmidt made the comments during the IFA show in Berlin, noting that Google TV would go international next year. Additionally, he said the company would begin working with content providers to get movies and shows on the device, but that it was was "very unlikely" that Google would get into the content production business itself.

Google announced Google TV in May of this year during its own developer conference, touting the device as a more open alternative to the closed set-top boxes out there (particularly the Apple TV). Because it will be Android-based and search-driven, third-party developers are expected to hop on board with a plethora of TV offerings—companies like Netflix and Amazon have already created native apps to run on Google TV.

Since the announcement, Google promised the FCC that it "seeks to achieve the vast pro-consumer potential of video convergence," but first, the FCC must make the proposed "AllVid" video interface a reality. Hollywood, however, isn't so gung-ho about Google TV and AllVid (surprise!), arguing that their wares would be presented alongside illegal content. "In essence, this 'shopping mall' approach could enable the purveyor of counterfeit goods to set up shop alongside respected brand-name retailers, causing consumer confusion," the MPAA said of the proposal.

Still, Google is pressing on with its plans to roll out a set-top box from Logitech, a Google TV-enabled Blu-ray player from Sony, and a Sony HDTV with Google services built-in. The new $99 Apple TV is also set for release this fall (the end of September, to be exact); although it is still a very different product than what Google TV hopes to be, many TV-watching geeks will keep an eye on both.

Read the comments on this post

Users of Google's search page were greeted Tuesday with a screen of colorful, interactive dots, even though the company didn't immediately explain why.

Apple's iPad may finally have some competition.

pgptag writes "This talk by Dr. Suzanne Gilbert (video) explains why quantum computers are useful, and also dispels some of the myths about what they can and cannot do. It addresses some of the practical ways in which we can build quantum computers and gives realistic timescales for how far away commercially useful systems might be."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Ireland's Computer Emergency Response Team differs from what you can find in most other countries, since it's not government-backed and relies mainly on the good will of several security professionals. In this interview, the founder and head of the CERT, Brian Honan, talks about how the CERT was formed, what equipment they use and what challenges they face in their daily work without having a government to back them up."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.