At Ars Technica , Joe Mullin recounts the tale of a shameless patent troll and its recent loss in court to online retailer Newegg : “Soverain isn’t in the e-commerce business; it’s in the higher-margin business of filing patent lawsuits against e-commerce companies. And it’s been quite successful until now. The company’s plan to extract a patent tax of about one percent of revenue from a huge swath of online retailers was snuffed out last week by Newegg and its lawyers, who won an appeal ruling that invalidates the three patents Soverain used to spark a vast patent war.”
Author: kenmay
Pentagon to boost Cyber Command fivefold, report says
Faced with rising cyberattack numbers and heckling by the likes of Anonymous, the Pentagon has decided to increase its staffing from 900 to 4,900 workers, according to the Washington Post. [Read more]
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Pentagon to boost Cyber Command fivefold, report says
Opalized Dinosaur Tooth
Photo: Carl Bento/Australian Museum Surely you’ve seen fossils in museums, but what about this: opalized dinosaur tooth. Opalized fossils occur when silica settled into cracks in the dinosaur bone and then hardened into opal. This one above is a particularly fantastic specimen: an opalized theropod dinosaur tooth from the Australian Museum.
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Opalized Dinosaur Tooth
Japan Launches Two New Spy Satellites
According to the Daily Yomiuri, “Japan launched two satellites on Jan. 27 to strengthen its surveillance capabilities, including keeping a closer eye on North Korea which has vowed to stage another nuclear test. One of them was a radar-equipped unit to complete a system of surveillance satellites that will allow Tokyo to monitor any place in the world at least once a day. The other was a demonstration satellite to collect data for research and development.” The Defense News version of the story says “Japan developed a plan to use several satellites as one group to gather intelligence in the late 1990s as a response to a long-range missile launch by Pyongyang in 1998. The space agency has said the radar satellite would be used for information-gathering, including data following Japan’s 2011 quake and tsunami, but did not mention North Korea by name.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Japan Launches Two New Spy Satellites
Yes, that PC cleanup app you saw on TV at 3 a.m. is a waste
Step one: incite panic. MyCleanPC.com Maybe you’ve seen the ads on the Internet or on TV in the wee hours of the morning. They make lofty promises: get rid of blue screens and error messages! Increase your speed! Clean up your system! But even when these PC cleanup apps aren’t just malware in disguise, the things they’re doing for your PC are often dubious. Many either replicate tasks that can be handled by built-in utilities or do things that could cause more problems than they solve. To highlight just why you and your loved ones should never let these applications anywhere near your PC, we picked one that we’d recently seen ads for: MyCleanPC. It’s the archetypal Windows cleanup app—and you probably shouldn’t install it. Intimidation tactics The standard ad for a PC cleanup app follows the same basic format as this ad from MyCleanPC.com . These ads for PC cleanup products often follow the same basic formula: appeal to people with slow or buggy PCs, throw in a few shots of an operating system that looks kind of like Windows, tack on some “customer testimonials,” and offer a free diagnosis that will make all the problems go away. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Yes, that PC cleanup app you saw on TV at 3 a.m. is a waste
Pod2g Confirms IOS 6, IOS 6.1 Beta 4 Untethered Jailbreak
hypnosec writes “Well known iOS security researcher Pod2g has confirmed that a working untethered iOS 6 jailbreak is ready and would be released as soon as iOS 6.1 GM is released. In an interview with iDigitalTimes, the security researcher has revealed that they are already in possession of a functional untethered iOS 6 and iOS 6.1 beta 4 jailbreak and majority of the work has been done by @planetbeing and @pimskeks. “6.0 is jailbroken, 6.1 beta 4 also. Now we are waiting 6.1 to confirm and release,” said the researcher. He said that the jailbreak would have been possible without him as he came into the iOS 6 jailbreak scene at a later stage and provided pointers that pushed the other researchers to the maximum.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Pod2g Confirms IOS 6, IOS 6.1 Beta 4 Untethered Jailbreak
This Is How You Build a Ford-Class Supercarrier
The USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) is a beast. It’s the first of the new Ford-class supercarriers, and arguably the best aircraft carrier ever designed . And building these mammoths is a serious undertaking. More »
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This Is How You Build a Ford-Class Supercarrier
With MS Research Help, UN Attempts To Model All of Earth’s Ecosystems
An anonymous reader writes “Microsoft Research and UN scientists have teamed up to build the first general-purpose computer model of whole ecosystems across the entire world. The project was detailed in a recent Nature article [note: yet another expensively paywalled original article] titled ‘Ecosystems: Time to model all life on Earth.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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With MS Research Help, UN Attempts To Model All of Earth’s Ecosystems
WindowsAndroid runs Google’s mobile OS natively on the Windows kernel
Sure, you could enjoy Android on your PC through dual-booting or virtualization , but the folks at Socketeq have whipped up yet another alternative: a port of Mountain View’s mobile OS, fittingly dubbed WindowsAndroid, that runs natively on the Windows kernel (under Vista, 7 and 8) instead of Linux. Not only does the operating system run speedily since its free of virtualization chains, but it serves up the appropriate tablet or smartphone UI based on window size, and plays nice with keyboards and mice, to boot. Socketeq’s solution serves up the full Android experience, but you’ll have to separately flash the Google apps that typically come baked in, according to Android Police . Ice Cream Sandwich is the freshest flavor of Android to have undergone the kernel-replacement treatment, and it’s currently being offered as a free “first-try” download at the source. Filed under: Cellphones , Desktops , Tablets , Microsoft , Google Comments Via: Android Police Source: Socketeq
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WindowsAndroid runs Google’s mobile OS natively on the Windows kernel
Scientists Have Created a Microscopic Tractor Beam
Spaceships can’t pull in foreign objects with a almost-magical tractor beam yet, but researchers have been making progress towards that goal. Scientists have now shown that tractor beams are possible, and can actually work . For microscopic objects over microscopic distances at least. More »