What began as a bill designed to protect the privacy of your digital life has been mangled at the behest of law enforcement agencies. CNET reports that if the revised Senate bill isn’t stopped before it goes to vote next week, 22 federal agencies will have warrantless access to troves of your private information. Let’s stop them. Updated below More »
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The Senate Is About to Let More Than 22 Agencies Spy on Your Email and Documents Without a Warrant (Update: Not Any More)
Over 60 years since the first digital computers switched on, the chances of seeing one of these pioneers in action have grown incredibly slim as time (and recycling) takes its toll. Take a visit to Britain’s National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park as of today, however, and you’ll see one working. A finished 3-year restoration effort lets the Harwell Dekatron — at one point renamed the Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computation from Harwell, or WITCH — claim the title of the world’s oldest functional digital computer still using its original design. Aside from its room-filling dimensions, the 1951-era mainframe may be worth the trip just for recalling a time when there were no hard and fast rules in computing: the Dekatron operates in its namesake decimal system, not binary, and puts most of its components on full display. The computer is part of the regular exhibit lineup and should be easy to see; the daunting part may be realizing that virtually any chip in a 2012 smartphone could outmuscle the Dekatron without breaking a sweat. Filed under: Desktops , Misc , Alt Comments Via: Slashdot Source: National Museum of Computing
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Harwell Dekatron revived as the world’s oldest working, original digital computer
concealment sends this quote from MIT’s Technology Review: “AT&T screwed up in 2010, serving up the e-mail addresses of over 110,000 of its iPad 3G customers online for anyone to find. But Andrew Auernheimer, an online activist who pointed out AT&T’s blunder to Gawker Media, which went on to publicize the breach of private information, is the one in federal court this week. Groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation worry that should that charge succeed it will become easy to criminalize many online activities, including work by well-intentioned activists looking for leaks of private information or other online security holes. [Auernheimer’s] case hasn’t received much attention so far, but should he be found guilty this week it will likely become well known, fast.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Jail Looms For Man Who Revealed AT&T Leaked iPad User E-Mails
We’ve just seen an update to Firefox for Android , but that’s not the only revision that Mozilla has had in the works. Today also sees the release of version 17 of the desktop browser, which brings with it a number of changes and one noticeable omission. The latter is a lack of support for Mac OS X 10.5 (a.k.a. Leopard), which Mozilla first announced last month — those on Leopard can of course continue to use Firefox 16, they just won’t receive any updates. Otherwise, you can expect a new “Awesome Bar” with larger icons, more than 20 promised performance improvements and a new click-to-play functionality for dealing with outdated or potentially vulnerable plug-ins. Also receiving the bump to version 17 is the Extended Support Release (or ESR) version of the browser, which disables the automatic updating to cause less headaches for those dealing with mass deployments. You can find the full change log at the source link below. Update: As TechCrunch notes , version 17 also adds the new Social API to Firefox, although Facebook is the only site to take advantage of it so far — it now lets you add Messenger to the browser’s sidebar. Filed under: Internet , Software Comments Via: WinBeta Source: Mozilla
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Firefox 17 heads out of beta, officially drops support for OS X 10.5
Windows: If you’re having problems with a Windows 8 Store app and nothing is working, Microsoft offers a few troubleshooting tips, as well as a utility that can automatically find and fix app problems for you—even ones you’re not aware of. More »
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Microsoft’s App Troubleshooter Finds and Fixes Problems with Windows 8
Amazon Web Services announced today that it will now offer virtual Windows 2012 server instances as part of its Enterprise Compute Cloud (EC2) service. Amazon Web Services’ Windows team General Manager Tom Rizzo—who until this June was Microsoft’s Senior Director for the Office and Office 365 teams, and had previously run Microsoft’s SharePoint team—revealed the addition of the Server 2012 platform in a post on the AWS team’s official blog . As Ars found in our review of Windows Server 2012 , the operating system has a number of advantages for cloud users over previous Windows Server operating systems, including better software-defined networking and improved remote configuration through PowerShell commands. Amazon is hardly the first to offer Server 2012 as a public cloud service—Microsoft’s Azure and a number of smaller cloud providers have had Server 2012 instances available since the operating system was released (and in some cases, before that). But there are a number of things that Amazon has done with Windows 2012 that are sure to draw attention from companies and developers looking to ease into using Server 2012 or go big right away. One is Amazon’s support for Server 2012 in AWS’s Elastic Beanstalk , a service that automatically takes care of many of the deployment and capacity-provisioning aspects of deploying an application to the AWS cloud. Amazon is also offering Server 2012 as part of its “free” tier of services as well—up to 750 hours of EC2 “Micro Instance” compute time per month, for up to a year. There’s also direct integration into Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 through the AWS Explorer Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
An anonymous reader writes “Harvard bioengineers have perfected injecting us with a drug-filled sponge instead of just a liquid. It may seem strange to want to inject a piece of sponge into your body, but it does actually help solve a number of invasive problems. For example, sometimes it is necessary to have drugs released slowly into our bodies, and/or some kind of bio-scaffold is required to be positioned so that it can help support a damaged organ or to engineer new tissue. This new, injectable sponge is incredibly useful because not only can it be filled with drugs that then are slowly released, it also has a memory and can be collapsed down to a tiny fraction of its original size.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Harvard Develops Drug-Filled, Injectable Sponge That Expands Inside the Body
Tux shares a perch with Ubuntu 12.10’s namesake bird Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock Write this down: Ubuntu 12.10, the late-year arrival from Canonical’s six-month standard release factory, marks the first new release within the company’s current long-term support cycle. Got it? Good, because it may be the best takeaway from the latest Ubuntu release, codenamed Quantal Quetzal. After that, it’s a bit of a rocky ride. The product’s development lineage is important to note from more of a business/adoption side perspective. The release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS in April was Canonical’s fourth long-term support product and signaled the end of one full two-year development cycle. Quantal Quetzal is the first standard release on the road to pushing out Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in Spring 2014 (undoubtedly to be codenamed “Uber-rocking Unicorn” if the pattern holds), and it sets up themes and directions which will mature over the next two years. Standard releases aren’t terribly different from the bi-annual LTS products, though they tend to be slightly less conservative in code offerings. The Ubuntu development community lets off the brakes a little and sticks some shiny back in. Read 63 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Review: Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal a mix of promise, pain
crookedvulture writes “Intel’s Next Unit of Computing has finally made its way into the hands of reviewers. The final revision is a little different from the demo unit that made the rounds earlier this year, but the concept remains the same. Intel has crammed what are essentially ultrabook internals into a tiny box measuring 4″ x 4″ x 2″. A mobile Core i3 CPU provides the horsepower, and there’s a decent array of I/O ports: USB, HDMI, and Thunderbolt. Users can add their own memory, storage, and wireless card to the system, which will be sold without an OS for around $300. Those extras raise the total price, bringing the NUC closer to Mac Mini territory. The Apple system has a bigger footprint, but it also boasts a faster processer and the ability to accommodate notebook hard drives with higher storage capacities than the mSATA SSDs that are compatible with the NUC. If Intel can convince system builders to adopt the NUC, the future of the PC could be a lot smaller.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Hands-On With Intel’s “Next Unit of Computing” Mini PC
Just such a wireless streaming feature could help Google’s Android compete better with iPad and iPhone, GigaOm reports. [Read more]
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Google reportedly working on open alternative to AirPlay