Google is helping Macs move into big businesses. Again. This week, Google announced that it would open source a software tool it built to automate the use of Apple's FileVault encryption software inside the company. The tool works with FileVault 2, which made its debut with Apple's Mac OS "Lion," and it's called -- of all things -- Cauliflower Vest.
Shareholders want directors and executives who are publicly accountable, who represent the interest of every investor, not just the founder or themselves.
Forcing a criminal suspect to decrypt hard drives so their contents can be used by prosecutors is a breach of the Fifth Amendment right against compelled self incrimination, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.
Apparently Wired.com managing editor Marty Cortinas is the only member of the Game|Life podcast who plays videogames anymore, as he illustrates with his impressions of the beta version this week.
Get ready for some awesome planetary alignment action this weekend. The moon, Venus, and Jupiter ? the three brightest objects in the night sky ? will be putting on a dazzling celestial show shortly after sunset both Feb. 25 and 26, coming together in a tight triangle. And if you can't see it where you are, watch this live online feed.
Planetary protection must prevent Earth-based life from going out as well as alien life from coming in. But there's a hefty cost to knowledge in zapping probable alien life in, say, a sample of Martian dust. Extremo Files blogger and astrobiologist Jeffrey Marlow explains.
The Sprite Slam Dunk Contest features a high-tech net that definitively quantifies the force of a dunk, allowing us to determine once and for all who throws down with the greatest authority.
For most of the Afghanistan war, the Taliban have provided a steady stream of suicide bombers to kill Afghan civilians and U.S. troops, according to Army statistics. Although suicide bombing isn't the insurgent's attack of choice, they've launched over 100 suicide attacks every year, for an average of about one every three days -- and the U.S. hasn't figured out how to stop them.
Chicken Licken was right, the sky really is falling. NASA satellite data has shown that the Earth's cloud tops have been lowering over the last decade.
Learn how to make fun stop-motion movies with your kids, without spending Hollywood money.
Around the world volcanoes are stirring. Eruptions blogger and volcanologist Erik Klemetti brings you nine volcanic regions to pore over -- including one on the moon.
This blog post was originally posted by PhotoShelter CEO and founder Allen Murayabashi on the PhotoShelter blog. Murayabashi was kind enough to share it with Raw File readers.
Facebook already builds its own data centers and its own servers. And now the social-networking giant is building its own storage hardware ? hardware for housing all that digital stuff uploaded by its more than 845 million users, including photos and videos. "We store a few photos here and there," says Frank Frankovsky, the ex-Dell man who oversees hardware design at Facebook.
The first nylon-bristled toothbrushes go on sale, a welcome alternative to chewing on sticks or scrubbing the teeth with ground-up oyster shells.
Though it might seem impossible, and certainly inadvisable, to judge a person by her name, a new study suggests our brains try anyway. The more pronounceable a person's name is, the more likely people are to favor her.
For more than a century, scientists have excavated fossils from the La Brea tar pits. It's a paleontological treasure chest, a snapshot of the late Pleistocene and Ice Age California. That picture is growing sharper by the day as paleontologists dig into Project 23, a huge cache uncovered almost six years ago during the construction of what would become a parking garage.
Mike Corbin is famous for two things: Fantastic motorcycle seats and a funky electric car. You don't remember the Corbin Sparrow? Mike Corbin does, and says it will fly again.
The Oscars are great, but let's face it: It's a party for Hollywood's most pretty, popular kids. And at the end of the night, they ? not the dweebs ? take home most of the little gold men. Not if we ran the show.
Shrimp farms in South and Southeast Asia are essentially factory farms, with all that implies -- including antibiotic overuse. Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna reports.
Israel says Iran is building a mega-missile that can hit the East Coast of the United States in three years, max. Before you give up your rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan, you should know that most missile experts and intelligence veterans think that's way, way off. Iran has many years worth of complex technical challenges to master before it gets an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.
A judge in London sends the Silicon Valley automaker Tesla home empty-handed for a second time.
We take a trip to the Vita Hill Social Club, where Sony is hooking up gamers with unique nights out centered around the PlayStation Vita, in this Game|Life video newscast.
Microsoft has unveiled a new version of Visual Studio, its venerable programming kit. Due out in beta next Wednesday, February 29, the new release -- codenamed Visual Studio 11 -- offers a new set of tools for building applications on Windows 8, the next incarnation of Microsoft's flagship operating system. But Microsoft also aims to simplify Visual Studio's developer environment and streamline collaboration among coders.
Are Apple's iPads about to overwhelm corporate networks? The research firm Gartner says that unless businesses plan for it, they could require three times the amount of wireless coverage in order to support the iPad on corporate networks.
A new Apple patent application filing called "Single Support Lever Keyboard Mechanism" describes a few different ways Apple could trim some of the fat from existing notebook keyboards, making them even more slender.
I love Alexis Ohanian?s technology-inspired take on the Jeremy Lin phenomenon not least because I think it?s totally wrong. This is what?s great about both sports and technology, at least if you enjoy talking about them. As long as everyone stays civil, you can argue forever.
chicksdaddy writes "Tech-enabled filtering and blocking of Web sites and Internet addresses that are deemed hostile to repressive regimes has been a major political and human rights issue in the last year, as popular protests in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria erupted. Now it looks as if Pakistan's government is looking for a way to strengthen its hand against online content it considers undesirable. According to a request for proposals from the National ICT (Information and Communications and Technologies) R&D Fund, the Pakistani government is struggling to keep a lid on growing Internet and Web use and is looking for a way to filter out undesirable Web sites. The 'indigenous' filtering system would be 'deployed at IP backbones in major cities, i.e., Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad,' the RFP reads (PDF). It would be 'centrally managed by a small and efficient team stationed at POPs of backbone providers,' and must be capable of supporting 100Gbps interfaces and filtering Web traffic against a block list of up to 50 million URLs without latency of more than 1 millisecond."
ananyo writes "Cultural Observatory at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts is to index the whole of the ArXiv pre-print database of papers from the physical sciences, breaking down the full text of the articles into component phrases to see how often a particular word or phrase appears relative to others — a measure of how 'meme-like' a term is. The team has already applied a similar approach to 5 million books in the Google Books database to produce their n-gram viewer. But the Google Books database carries with it a major limitation: because many of the works are under copyright, users cannot be pointed to the actual source material. Applying the tool to ArXiv means it could be used to chart trends in high-energy physics, for example: a quickening pulse of papers citing the Higgs boson, for example, or a peak in papers about supersymmetry, a theory which may soon be waning."
nonprofiteer writes "A profile of Facebook's CSO reveals that his 70-person security team includes 25 people dedicated solely to handling information requests from law enforcement. They get thousands of calls and e-mails from authorities each week, though Facebook requires police to get a warrant for anything beyond a subscriber's name, email and IP address. CSO Joe Sullivan says that some government agency tried to push Facebook to start collecting more information about their users for the benefit of authorities: 'Recently a government agency wanted us to start logging information we don't log. We told them we wouldn't start logging that piece of data because we don't need it to provide a good product. We talked to our general counsel. The law is not black-and-white. That agency thinks they can compel us to. We told them to go to court. They haven't done that yet.'"
snydeq writes "Bjarne Stroustrup discusses the latest version of C++, which, although not a major overhaul, offers many small upgrades to appeal to different areas of development. From the interview: 'I like the way move semantics will simplify the way we return large data structures from functions and improve the performance of standard-library types, such as string and vector. People in high-performance areas will appreciate the massive increase in the power of constant expressions (constexpr). Users of the standard library (and some GUI libraries) will probably find lambda expressions the most prominent feature. Everybody will use smaller new features, such as auto (deduce a variable's type from its initializer) and the range-for loop, to simplify code.'"
ESRB writes "North Korea is apparently able to produce high-quality counterfeits of U.S. dollars — specifically $100 and $50 bills. It's suspected that they possess similar printing technologies as the U.S. and buy ink from the same Swedish firm. 'Since the superdollars were first detected about a decade ago, the regime has been pocketing an estimated $15 to $25 million a year from them. (Other estimates are much higher — up to several hundred million dollars' worth.)' The article also advocates a move to all-digital payment/transfers by pointing out both forms are only representations of value and noting it would cripple criminal operations such as drug cartels, human traffickers, and so forth."
cylonlover writes "With the wait still on for a miniaturization ray to allow some Fantastic Voyage-style medical procedures by doctors in submarines, tiny electronic implants capable of traveling in the bloodstream show much more promise. While the miniaturization of electronic and mechanical components now makes such devices feasible, the lack of a comparable reduction in battery size has held things back. Now engineers at Stanford University have demonstrated a tiny, self-propelled medical device that would be wirelessly powered from outside the body, enabling devices small enough to move through the bloodstream."
An anonymous reader writes "Game journalist Stuart Campbell has written an incisive piece on how the digital distribution model users have grown to know and love over the past several years still has some major problems that go beyond even the DRM dilemma. He provides an example of an app developer using very shady update techniques to screw over people who have legitimately purchased their app. Touch Racing Nitro, a retro racing game, launched to moderate success. After tinkering with price points to get the game to show up on the top download charts, the developers finally made it free for a period of four months. 'Then the sting came along. About a week ago (at time of writing), the game received an "update," which came with just four words of description – "Now Touch Racing Free!" As the game was already free, users could have been forgiven for thinking this wasn't much of a change. But in fact, the app thousands of them had paid up to £5 for had effectively just been stolen. Two of the game's three racing modes were now locked away behind IAP paywalls, and the entire game was disfigured with ruinous in-game advertising, which required yet another payment to remove.'"
An anonymous reader writes "File hosting sites have been under increased pressure since the shutdown of Megaupload — both from law enforcement and from the sudden influx of new users. RapidShare, already dealing with a reputation as a facilitator of piracy, has now instituted a policy they hope will drive pirates away: download speed caps for its free service. According to TorrentFreak, 'RapidShare says that there is a direct link between free users of file-hosting services and copyright infringement. Those who like to pirate prefer not to pay, the company believes, not least because they want to avoid connecting their personal payment details to a copyright-infringing cyberlocker account. Now, there will be those who say that however RapidShare dress it up, the company will be aware that the restrictions will drive users to their premium services to get better speeds. But interestingly RapidShare is now offering ways for users to get faster download speeds without paying a dime — providing those uploading the original files they’re trying to access do some work.'"
An anonymous reader writes "New research at the boundary of physics and computer science shows that determining the dynamical equations of a system from observations of its behavior is NP-hard. From the abstract: 'The behavior of any physical system is governed by its underlying dynamical equations. Much of physics is concerned with discovering these dynamical equations and understanding their consequences. In this work, we show that, remarkably, identifying the underlying dynamical equation from any amount of experimental data, however precise, is a provably computationally hard problem (it is NP-hard), both for classical and quantum mechanical systems.'"
langelgjm writes "Bringing a lengthy legal battle to a close, New York City's Department of Education will today release detailed evaluation reports on individual English and math teachers as a result of a request under public information laws. The city's teachers union has responded with full page ads (PDF) decrying the methodology used in the evaluations. The court's decision attempts to balance the public interest in this data against the rights of individual teachers. Across the country, a large number of states are moving to evaluate teachers based on student performance in an attempt to raise student achievement in the U.S."
MrSeb writes "At Mobile World Congress, which begins in three days, Mozilla will finally take the wraps off the Mozilla Marketplace and allow developers to submit their open web technology (HTML5, JavaScript, CSS) apps. While the Marketplace will play an important role in keeping Firefox in step with Chrome, these apps will actually play a far more important role: Boot to Gecko (B2G), Mozilla's upcoming smartphone and tablet OS, will also use the Marketplace. For B2G to succeed it must have apps, and to create apps you need developers. That's why, at MWC, according to a source close to the matter, Mozilla will also be announcing that it has partnered up with LG to make a developer-oriented B2G-powered mobile device. Even more interestingly, Brendan Eich, Mozilla's Chief Technology Officer, says that it will unveil other partners at MWC as well — probably carriers, who are eager to use the open B2G and its Marketplace to escape the huge control that Apple and Google currently exert in the smartphone space."
JumperCable writes "Scientists at Mexico's National Institute of Psychiatry are working on a vaccine that makes the body resistant to the effects of heroin, so users would no longer get a rush of pleasure. The researchers say they have successfully tested the vaccine on mice and are preparing to test it on humans. Mice given the vaccine showed a huge drop in heroin consumption. 'It would be a vaccine for people who are serious addicts, who have not had success with other treatments and decide to use this application to get away from drugs.'"
An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has found that forcing a suspect to decrypt his hard drive when the government did not already know what it contained would violate his 5th Amendment rights. According to Orin Kerr of the Volohk Conspiracy, 'the court's analysis (PDF) isn't inconsistent with Boucher and Fricosu, the two district court cases on 5th Amendment limits on decryption. In both of those prior cases, the district courts merely held on the facts of the case that the testimony was a foregone conclusion.'"