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Feature: Game over—how sanctions and violence doomed Syria’s gaming industry

May 7, 2012 · Posted in RSS Feeds · Comments Off

"Life for Syrian game developers has never been better," joked Falafel Games founder Radwan Kasmiya in an e-mail to Ars Technica. "You can test the action on the streets and get back to your desktop to script it on your keyboard."

Kasmiya's icy humor hides a sobering truth about the troubles faced by Syria's once-promising game development industry. The country once looked like a future technology hub, with its centralized location among the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries allowing it to easily draw programming and engineering talent from Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt. But that promise has been effectively squashed, first by global economic sanctions and then by more than a year of bloody civil conflict.

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Leave only footprints: how Google’s ethical ignorance gets it in trouble

May 6, 2012 · Posted in RSS Feeds · Comments Off

"According to a well written and thorough article in the Virginia Journal of Law & Technology, what we've been saying for over three years has been determined to be true: WarDriving is not a crime."

That's the text of a September 8, 2004 blog post by Marius Milner, the engineer who developed NetStumbler, a tool used to map WiFi networks using a WiFi card and GPS (also known as "wardriving"). Milner is also the engineer Google has claimed was solely responsible for the code that collected personal data from WiFi networks, including e-mail addresses and passwords, with the company's Street View cars between May 2007 and May 2010.

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Week in tech: Microsoft’s Linux supernodes, Ubuntu’s best apps, and more

May 5, 2012 · Posted in RSS Feeds · Comments Off

Skype replaces P2P supernodes with Linux boxes hosted by Microsoft (updated): Microsoft has overhauled the structure of Skype, replacing peer-to-peer supernodes made up of ordinary users with about 10,000 Linux boxes that have been hardened to withstand hack attacks, a security researcher says.

Free as in awesome: our favorite open source apps for Ubuntu 12.04: Ubuntu 12.04 landed last week. In this roundup, we take a brief look at some of the most useful applications that users can install from Ubuntu's Software Center.

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Malicious apps hosted in Google store turn Android phones into zombies

May 4, 2012 · Posted in RSS Feeds · Comments Off

Google has been caught hosting more than a dozen malicious titles in its official Android app market. Some had been downloaded tens of thousands of times and turn smartphones into zombies that await commands from their attacker overlords, security researchers said.

A stash of 17 malicious apps remained freely available in the Google Play store, according to a blog post published Thursday by researchers from antivirus provider Trend Micro. Six of those titles contained a highly stealthy code dubbed Plankton, which causes Android-based phones to connect to command and control servers and wait for commands. At least 10 Plankton-based apps found last year in the Android market collected users' browsing history, bookmarks, and device information and sent them to servers under the control of the attackers.

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Feature: 1859′s “Great Auroral Storm”—the week the Sun touched the earth

May 3, 2012 · Posted in RSS Feeds · Comments Off

Noon approached on September 1, 1859, and British astronomer Richard Christopher Carrington was busy with his favorite pastime: tracking sunspots, those huge regions of the star darkened by shifts in its magnetic field. He projected the Sun's image from his viewing device onto a plate of glass stained a "pale straw colour," which gave him a picture of the fiery globe one inch shy of a foot in diameter.

The morning's work went as normal. Carrington patiently counted and charted spots, time-lining changes in their positions with a chronometer. Then he saw something unusual.

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French group sues because Google Suggest thinks Jon Hamm is Jewish

May 2, 2012 · Posted in RSS Feeds · Comments Off

A French court is set to hear arguments on Wednesday from an anti-racism group fighting against Google Suggest search results. SOS Racisme and others have brought a lawsuit against Google over its feature that lets search terms for various celebrities, including Rupert Murdoch and Jon Hamm, be associated with the word "jew" through Google Suggest.

Over the weekend, an attorney with SOS Racisme, Patrick Klugman, told the Agence France Presse that Google Suggest has facilitated the "creation of what is probably the largest Jewish file in history."

"A great many number of users of France’s and the world’s number one search engine are confronted daily with the non-solicited and almost systematic association of the term ‘Jew’ with famous people in the world of politics, media, and business," the organizations allege.

In September 2011, the French group famously pressured Apple to remove the "Jew or not Jew" app from the iTunes store.

Europe 1, a French television channel, reports that there has been legal precedent in France over similar cases. In 2010, a Frenchman filed a suit because his name was systematiclaly associated with "satanist," "rapist," and "convicted." He won €1 in damages and €5,000 ($6,600) to recover his legal fees. The following year a Lyon company was able to win €50,000 ($66,000) for having its search results associated with a slang term for "cheater."

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Feature: “Free babysitting”: how would-be pedophiles use Craigslist—and how they get caught

May 1, 2012 · Posted in RSS Feeds · Comments Off

Craigslist classified ads may have kneecapped the newspaper business, but they are doing wonders for amateur comedians, finders of false teeth, and fashioners of crucifix-shaped guitars played by men dressed as Funky Jesus.

"I am an atheist seeking friends who are pious and who will be wisked away for the rapture that kirk cameron says is coming may 22nd 2011," said one obviously humorous ad last year. "I get to keep all your stuff because you won't need them as you will be in rapturous bliss basking in the love of the great creator. I, however, will need your stuff since I will be trapped here on earth with all the rest of the unclean, deniers, and cravens."

But most unbelievable posts concern sex. A famous find from 2008 instructed any interested woman to arrive at a certain hotel, walk into a certain room (the door would be open), and lie down naked on the bed with posterior in the air. The woman was to pick up the NES controller lying there and start up Super Mario Bros. The man who posted the ad—hiding in the bathroom until this point—said he would only come out when the game had begun.

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Free as in awesome: our favorite open source apps for Ubuntu 12.04

April 30, 2012 · Posted in RSS Feeds · Comments Off

Ubuntu 12.04, codenamed Precise Pangolin, was released last week, and I’ve been updating my Linux boxes to the shiny new version of the operating system. The upgrade system has gotten a lot smoother in recent years, but I still like to do a fresh installation for each release on my PC and netbook. In this short roundup, I’ll look at some great third-party applications that you can get from the Software Center to augment your Ubuntu installation.

Word processing: LibreOffice, which is included by default in Ubuntu 12.04, has made a lot of progress since it was forked from OpenOffice.org. The developers are adding features, removing bloat, and generally delivering a better user experience. Despite these advances, I still find myself occasionally wanting a lightweight word processor with less overhead, particularly for quick document viewing. Abiword meets those requirements, and also offers a great user interface with a more native look and feel.
Graphics: The GIMP, a powerful open source application for editing raster images, is very popular among Linux enthusiasts. But users who are looking for a less complicated alternative might prefer Pinta, a more intuitive application that is better suited for day-to-day tasks. For vector art, you can’t beat Inkscape, an impressive application that is both powerful and easy to use. If you are into 3D graphics, then you won’t want to miss Blender, a versatile tool that supports 3D modeling, texturing, animation, and many other capabilities.
Productivity: The popular Tomboy note-taking application was removed in Ubuntu 12.04, but it’s easy to install from the Software Center. It’s still a great choice for users, but there are a number of other good options available. Zim, for example, supports wiki-inspired linking like Tomboy but offers a more elaborate system for note organization. Another great productivity application that I like to use on Ubuntu is GTG, a to-do list application that supports the “Getting Things Done” methodology.
Multimedia: My favorite video player for Ubuntu is Totem, the one that is included in the default installation. It’s powered by GStreamer, the standard multimedia framework of the GNOME desktop environment. You can get support for a wide range of video formats in Totem and other GStreamer-based applications by installing the restricted extras metapackage or just the GStreamer ffmpeg package. Some users prefer VLC, which is also available from the Software Center. If you are looking for a media center application that you can control from the couch, you might want to check out XBMC.
Editors: Vim or Emacs, need I say more? Of course, there are also plenty of options available for ~~heathens~~ those of you who prefer less powerful alternatives. Scite, Leafpad, and Geany are all popular choices. You can also install a bunch of plugins to increase the capabilities of GEdit, the GNOME text editor that comes with Ubuntu. For simple distraction-free editing, you could try PyRoom. If you are working with Markdown or reStructured text, you might want to try ReText.
IDEs: I’m a big fan of Qt Creator, a clean and simple development environment for building applications with the Qt toolkit. It has a visual form designer, an integrated debugging interface, and other tools that simplify Qt development. If you are looking to build Gtk+ and GNOME applications, you might want to check out MonoDevelop and Anjuta. The highly-extensible Eclipse IDE is also useful to install, especially if you are planning to do Java or Android development.

There are thousands of other applications available through the Software Center, many of which are supplied by Debian’s massive package repository. What are you some of your favorites?

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PARC showcases business models, not products, at 10 year anniversary

April 29, 2012 · Posted in RSS Feeds · Comments Off

The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is known beyond Silicon Valley for its role developing products—Ethernet, WSYIWYG editors, laser printing. But mentions of those historic heights were kept at a minimum during this week's Power of 10 conference. The message of the day was clear with the first words to greet guests at the registration table (via both conference workers and a commemorative bookmark).

"Just wanted to let you know, 'Xerox PARC' is so 10 years ago. Today, we're 'PARC, a Xerox company.'"

PARC's Power of 10 is a year-long series of events, including public-friendly guest presentations and this half-day conference, to commemorate the company's first ten years of independent operation. In 2002 Xerox incorporated PARC as an independent, wholly owned subsidiary, shifting the R&D pioneers toward an open innovation business model that took center stage on Thursday.

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