Forscher der Universität Tel Aviv haben mittels einer Umfrage unter 150 Freiwilligen die Auswirkungen von Smartphones auf das Konzept Privatsphäre in öffentlichen Räumen untersucht, wie Aftau.org berichtet. Die Hälfte der Befragten waren Smartphone-Nutzer. Die Ergebnisse legen nahe, dass Smartphones tatsächlich zu Verhaltensänderungen im öffentlichen Raum führen.

Der Börsengang von Facebook wird Mitgründer Eduardo Saverin zum Milliardär machen - und er sorgt auf ungewöhnliche Weise dafür, dass er möglichst viel davon hat. Der 30-Jährige gibt seine US-Staatsbürgerschaft auf, um seine Steuerrechnung zu senken. Saverin plane, bis auf weiteres in Singapur zu wohnen, erklärte sein Sprecher der Finanznachrichtenagentur Bloomberg.

Die Preise für seltene Kameras schiessen in den Himmel: Bei der 21. Westlicht-Auktion in Wien knackte am Samstag eine Vorserien-Leica aus dem Jahr 1923 den Weltrekord und erzielte einen Auktionspreis von 2,16 Mio. Euro (inklusive Aufgeld).

Im vergangenen Jahr hat der Datenschutz im Wallis dreimal mehr gekostet, als das Walliser Parlament einst vorgesehen hat. Dem Grossen Rat passt das nicht. Per Motion hat der Walliser Grossrat daher die Regierung beauftragt, die Kosten der Datenschutzbeauftragten zu analysieren und dafür zu sorgen, dass der Datenschutz künftig nicht mehr so viel kostet.

Internet-Handelsriese Amazon will drei neue Blogs starten, wie The Daily berichtet. Die jeweiligen Themen sind digitale Fotografie, Gadgets und Nerd-Lifestyle. Die Plattformen sollen unvoreingenommene Artikel bieten, die jedoch auf die jeweiligen Produktseiten bei Amazon verlinkt sind.

Facebook will seine Datenschutzrichtlinie massiv erneuern. Das weltgrösste Onlinenetzwerk stellte die Vorlage für eine neue Version mit zahlreichen Änderungen zur Diskussion ins Netz. Eine wesentliche Neuerung ist, dass einige Informationen länger als bisher gespeichert werden könnten.

Apples Pläne für einen eigenen Fernseher hat nach einem Medienbericht der Chef von Apples Auftragsfertiger Foxconn, Terry Gou, bestätigt. Foxconn bereite sich derzeit konkret auf die Produktion von Apples iTV vor, sagte Gou in einem Interview der „China Daily“. Bisher habe aber weder die Entwicklung noch die Produktion begonnen.

Einer Studie der ETH Zürich zufolge halten sich Menschen in anonymen Chats weitgehend an soziale Normen. Ein anonymes Auftreten in Internet-Chats geht demnach nicht mit hemmungslosen Pöbeleien einher. Ganz im Gegenteil: Die meisten Nutzer geben sich positiv, manchmal neutral und selten negativ.

Nach dem Aufruf von 100 prominenten Autoren und Künstlern zur Stärkung des Urheberrechts haben Internet-Nutzer eine Gegenerklärung veröffentlicht. „Wir wollen das Urheberrecht nicht abschaffen", betonen die Unterzeichner, innerhalb weniger Stunde mehr als 1400. Das Internet habe aber die Rahmenbedingungen für kulturelles Schaffen dramatisch verändert, womit sich für alle neue Fragen stellten.

Der wegen Bilanzfälschungen serbelnde japanische Kamera- und Elektronikkonzern Olympus mit Hauptsitz in Tokia muss für das Fiskaljahr 2011/12 einen Verlust in Höhe von 48,99 Milliarden Yen (570 Millionen Franken) in die Bücher eintragen. Im vorherigen Fiskaljahr 2010/11 wurde noch ein kleiner Gewinn von 3,87 Milliarden Yen (45 Millionen Franken) eingefahren. Der Verlust hängt laut Olympus im Wesentlichen mit der Aufdeckung des Bilanzskandals im Vorjahr zusammen.

MojoKid writes "Microsoft can't do anything to magically make hard drives stop failing when parts go bad, but Redmond is rolling out a new NTFS health model for Windows 8 with a redesigned chkdsk tool for disk corruption detection and fixing. In past versions of the chkdsk and NTFS health model, the file system volume was either deemed healthy or not healthy. In Windows 8, Microsoft is changing things up. Rather than hours of downtime, Windows 8 splits the process into phases that include 'Detect Corruption,' 'Online Self-Healing,' 'Online Verification,' 'Online Identification & Logging,' and 'Precise & Rapid Correction.'"

CWmike writes "CNET's Declan McCullagh reported last week on the FBI's argument that the massive shift of communications from the telephone system to the Internet 'has made it far more difficult for the agency to wiretap Americans suspected of illegal activities.' The law has already been expanded once, in 2004, to include broadband networks, but still excludes Web companies. The FBI says its surveillance efforts are in danger of 'going dark' if it is not allowed to monitor the way people communicate now. Not surprisingly, a range of opponents, from privacy advocates to legal experts, disagree — strongly. On key tech hitch with the plan, per ACLU attorney Mark Rumold and others: There is a difference between wiretapping phones and demanding a backdoor to Internet services. 'A backdoor doesn't just make it accessible to the FBI — it makes it vulnerable to others,' Rumold says."

skipkent writes with news that Britain is planning to use high-tech, non-lethal sonic weapons to provide security at the Olympics this summer. The Ministry of Defense says they intend to use the devices primarily as giant loudspeakers. But if they find themselves in need of a way to disperse crowds, the weapons can project sound up to 150 decibels, causing physical pain within a few hundred meters. "It has been successfully used aboard ships to repel Somali pirates." The maximum range for alarms and warnings is 3km. "Police and military planners say they are preparing for a range of security threats at the Olympics including protesters trying to disrupt events and attacks using hijacked airliners."

Nancy_A writes "An engineer has proposed — and outlined in meticulous detail — building a full-sized, ion-powered version of the starship Enterprise. The ship would be based on current technology, and would take about 20 years to construct, at a cost of roughly $1 trillion. 'We have the technological reach to build the first generation of the spaceship known as the USS Enterprise – so let's do it,' writes the curator of the Build The Enterprise website, who goes by the name of BTE-Dan."

TheGift73 writes "TorrentFreak reports that 'This week yet another court order was handed down in Europe with the aim of censoring The Pirate Bay. The ruling forbids the Dutch Pirate Party from not only running a direct proxy, but also telling people how to circumvent an earlier court ordered blockade. However, according to Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge, the judge in the case has a history of corruption relating to another file-sharing case he presided over in the Netherlands. The Court of The Hague in the Netherlands has been particularly busy this work with Pirate Bay-related cases.' Falkvinge wrote, '... not only was the plaintiff and judge personally and closely acquainted, the plaintiff in a controversial copyright monopoly case was running a commercial anti-piracy outfit together with the judge in the case. Money was involved. Commercial interest was involved. The judge was, as it appears from this brochure for the quite expensive course, getting money. Shortly after the case. In a directly related matter together with the plaintiff. That makes the judge not only corrupt, but textbook corrupt.'"

Hugh Pickens writes "Dr James Hansen, director of the NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who first made warnings about climate change in the 1980s, writes in the NY Times that he was troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves 'regardless of what we do.' According to Hansen 'Canada's tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now.' Hansen says that instead of placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to make fossil fuels pay their true costs, leveling the energy playing field, the world's governments are forcing the public to subsidize fossil fuels with hundreds of billions of dollars per year."

alphadogg writes "No one will ever say that America's wireless carriers are too proud to beg. This year's Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association Wireless trade show in New Orleans seemed less like an industry gathering at times and more like an infomercial dedicated to forcing the government's hand to free up more spectrum. Start with CTIA President and CEO Steve Largent, who dedicated the vast majority of his introductory keynote address to discussing the challenges carriers will face if they don't get fresh spectrum to use within the next few years. Execs from T-Mobile, Verizon and others also beat the drum. Verizon Wireless CEO Dan Mead, for example, said: 'Innovation is at risk today due to the spectrum shortage that we face. If additional spectrum is not available in the near-term, mobile data will exceed capacity by 2015.'"

fishmike writes "Online music storage firm MP3tunes, Inc filed for bankruptcy in a U.S. court, following its prolonged run-in with music publishing giant EMI Group over copyright issues, court filings showed. MP3tunes is a so-called cloud music service that lets users store music in online 'lockers.' Amazon.com Inc, Apple Inc and Google Inc have similar cloud services."

An anonymous reader writes "I work in a network environment that requires multiple people to have access to numerous Wireless Access Keys, iTunes/iCloud accounts/passwords, hardware appliance logins, etc. I'm attempting to replace the ever popular 'protected' excel spreadsheet that exists in almost every network with all usernames and passwords just waiting to be discovered. Are there any open source, multi-user, secure and preferably Linux-based password management tools that the Slashdot community would recommend?"

parallel_prankster writes "Bloomberg reports that Eduardo Saverin, the billionaire co- founder of Facebook, has renounced his U.S. citizenship before an initial public offering that values the social network at as much as $96 billion, a move that may reduce his tax bill. From the article: 'Facebook plans to raise as much as $11.8 billion through the IPO, the biggest in history for an Internet company. Saverin's stake is about 4 percent, according to the website Who Owns Facebook. At the high end of the IPO valuation, that would be worth about $3.84 billion. Saverin, 30, joins a growing number of people giving up U.S. citizenship, a move that can trim their tax liabilities in that country. Saverin won't escape all U.S. taxes. Americans who give up their citizenship owe what is effectively an exit tax on the capital gains from their stock holdings, even if they don't sell the shares, said Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, director of the international tax program at the University of Michigan's law school. For tax purposes, the IRS treats the stock as if it has been sold.'"

An anonymous reader writes "In the next decade, our brains are going to become optimized for information browsing, says best-selling author Nicholas Carr. According to Carr, while the genetic nature of our brains isn't being changed by the Internet at all, our brains are adapting 'at a cellular level' and are weakening modes of thinking we no longer exercise. Therefore, in 10 years, if human beings are using the Internet even more than they do today, says Carr, "our brains will be even more optimized for information browsing, skimming and scanning, and multitasking — fast, scattered modes of thought — and even less capable of the kinds of more attentive, contemplative thinking that the net discourages."" While Carr isn't making a case for Lamarckian evolution, the argument here seems weak to me; the same kind of brain change could be attributed to books, or television, or the automobile, couldn't it?

coondoggie writes "According to court documents, investigation by federal law enforcement agents revealed that subjects whose domain names had been seized in a November 2010 operation continued to sell counterfeit goods using new domain names. In particular, the individuals, based in China, sold counterfeit professional and collegiate sports apparel, primarily counterfeit sports jerseys." So now the government has again taken over a swathe of domain names used in crime.