Cody Taylor

In my travels, I discovered David Zeuthen’s informative peek at DeviceKit (and its use with and in lieu of HAL) in the upcoming release of Fedora 11.

In the aftermath of the Pirate Bay verdict, Sweden has witnessed the demise of many other BitTorrent trackers. But not quite enough according to music industry lobby group IFPI, who are now threatening the hosting providers of torrent sites. The private BitTorrent tracker TorrentBytes appears to be one of the first victims.

Since the announcement of iPhone software 3.0, the Internet has been busy picking away at its many builds finding new and exciting features. Once feature the OS spelunkers don’t have to root around for is MMS. Apple is finally bringing the sought after feature to the iPhone.

Hugh Pickens writes “A quote attributed to French composer Maurice Jarre was posted on wikipedia shortly after his death in March and later appeared in obituaries in mainstream media. ‘One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear,’ Jarre was quoted as saying. However, these words were not uttered by the Oscar-winning composer but written by Shane Fitzgerald, a final-year undergraduate student, who said he wanted to show how journalists use the internet as a primary source for their stories. Fitzgerald posted the quote on Wikipedia late at night after news of Jarre’s death broke. ‘I saw it on breaking news and thought if I was going to do something I should do it quickly. I knew journalists wouldn’t be looking at it until the morning,’ The quote had no referenced sources and was therefore taken down by moderators of Wikipedia within minutes. However, Fitzgerald put it back up a few more times until it was finally left up on the site for more than 24 hours. While he was wary about the ethical implications of using someone’s death as a social experiment, he had carefully generated the quote so as not to distort or taint Jarre’s life, he said. ‘I didn’t expect it to go that far. I expected it to be in blogs and sites, but on mainstream quality papers? I was very surprised.'”

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Trunks writes “No doubt trying to ride the hype train that’s currently going for the new Star Trek film, Space.com has a new article detailing how warp drive may not be impossible to acheivefrom the article,'”The idea is that you take a chunk of space-time and move it,” said Marc Millis, former head of NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project. “The vehicle inside that bubble thinks that it’s not moving at all. It’s the space-time that’s moving.” One reason this idea seems credible is that scientists think it may already have happened. Some models suggest that space-time expanded at a rate faster than light speed during a period of rapid inflation shortly after the Big Bang. “If it could do it for the Big Bang, why not for our space drives?” Millis said.’ Simple, right?”

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Hugh Pickens writes “More than a thousand pages of material about Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), are still being withheld, despite the Obama administration’s promises to run a more open government. The EFF and Public Knowledge filed suit in September of 2008, demanding that background documents on ACTA be disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). “We are very disappointed with the USTR’s decision to continue to withhold these documents The president promised an open and transparent administration,” said EFF Senior Counsel David Sobel. Publicly available information about the treaty shows it could establish far-reaching customs regulations over Internet traffic in the guise of anti-counterfeiting measures. Additionally, multi-national IP industry companies have publicly requested that ISPs be required to engage in filtering of their customers’ Internet communications for potentially copyright-infringing material, force mandatory disclosure of personal information about alleged copyright infringers, and adopt ‘Three Strikes’ policies requiring ISPs to automatically terminate customers’ Internet access upon a repeat allegation of copyright infringement. ‘What we’ve seen tends to confirm that the substance of ACTA remains a grave concern,’ said Public Knowledge Staff Attorney Sherwin Siy. ‘The agreement increasingly looks like an attempt by Hollywood and the content industries to perform an end-run around national legislatures and public international forums to advance an aggressive, radical change in the way that copyright and trademark laws are enforced.'”

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ceswiedler writes “Aurelien Jarno has just uploaded a fork of glibc called eglibc, which is targeted at embedded systems and is source- and binary-compatible with glibc. It has a few nice improvements over glibc, but the primary motivation seems to be that it’s a ‘more friendly upstream project’ than glibc. Glibc’s maintainer, Ulrich Drepper, has had a contentious relationship with Debian’s project leadership; in 2007 the Debian Project Leader sent an email criticizing Drepper for refusing to fix a bug on glibc on the ARM architecture because in Drepper’s words it was ‘for the sole benefit of this embedded crap.'”

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Thanks to researchers at Cranfield University, you don’t have to feel bad when you plow into a group of pedestrians who are crossing the street too slowly. They have designed an external airbag that mounts to your hood at the base of the windshield. Research shows that this is the area where a pedestrian’s head is most likely to hit in an accident. “Test results indicate that the system works extremely well. When fitted to a demonstrator vehicle not originally designed with pedestrian protection in mind, the results were well inside all current legal criteria for pedestrian protection currently in force in Europe,” Roger Hardy of the university’s Cranfield Impact Centre said.

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