Nobody doubts the United States is in need of reforming copyright law. Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante tells a House congressional subcommittee that everything from anticircumvention provisions and fair use to length of copyright and performance royalties should be on the table.
The U.S. government just put a $5 million bounty on the world's premiere rapping, tweeting jihadist. #bandz #racks #worldstar #terrorism
It's supposed to be a time of smaller military budgets. But the Air Force is seeing if it can pay someone to set up a fantasy football league for it.
Police in some states, including California, inspect mobile phones of anybody arrested, without a warrant, based on the legal theory that officers have a right to review the belongings of those they apprehend. But the American Civil Liberties Union is trying to change that with a novel legal theory. On Wednesday, it sued the San Francisco Police Department, claiming the warrantless search of arrestees? mobile phones not only breaches the First Amendment right of those arrested, but also violates the same rights of those in the suspect?s phone contacts, Facebook feed and text messages, etc.
Twitter has received a patent for, well, Twitter. Originally filed in 2008, the patent describes a "device independent message distribution platform," and it was officially granted Tuesday by the U.S. Patents and Trademark Office.
While Ford and GM are opening their dashboards to developers to accelerate the creation of automotive apps, Abalta Technologies has introduced a solution for making app integration easier and faster with the launch of its Weblink platform.
Despite reports to the contrary, NASA's tiny interplanetary probe Voyager 1 has not really left the solar system yet.
Forget Ashton Kutcher and Aaron Sorkin: The people behind the first Steve Jobs biopic are Justin Long and Dr. Venture in Funny or Die's upcoming "iSteve."
Sending longreads to your Kindle just got easier. When your job gets in the way of reading something on the internet, read-it-later services like Pocket and Instapaper will let you download a story to their apps for offline access at your leisure. Now Amazon is entering the read-that-really-long-story-later market with a Send to Kindle button ...
Atelier Food is a new food lab in Sweden, dedicated to exploring the future of food with a multi disciplinary team of artists, designers, scientists and business developers and chefs. They're exploring ways to rethink our food systems by running workshops and experimental restaurants.When it came time to promote their work, Art Director Petter Johansson decided to create a link between food and society by making a still-life city from food.
After lying on the ocean floor for more than 40 years, the Apollo rocket engines that helped deliver astronauts to the moon are once again seeing the light of day.
Blending a design used for decades by NASA's space shuttle program with another employed by a U.S. launch company, Swiss Space Systems aims to "democratize" the launching of small satellites into orbit.
Few animals capture our imagination the way whales do. As fellow mammals, there's something immediately recognizable about them -- and yet, specialized as they are for deep ocean life, they're magically foreign, too, like visitors from another world. Wired takes a tour of that world at
Don't expect global drone strikes to decline if the U.S. military absorbs the CIA drone program. The real levers over the drone program are political, not institutional.
You've probably seen Libratone's speakers on display in Apple's retail stores. They're the visually striking, fabric-covered things that look like little sculptures. A new addition to the line: the $400 Zipp.
There are tons of public workshops and maker spaces around the San Francisco Bay Area. With a TechShop right around the corner from Wired's offices, we're next to a location where you can do everything from woodworking to metal fabrication to building musical instruments and more.
If you're an e-commerce company, the people who buy stuff on your site are important. But they're not the only customers who matter.
Several troubled giants -- HTC, BlackBerry, Nokia -- are feeling a squeeze that may be hard to recover from.
Mathematicians at West Point set out to find an algorithm that could help the National Hockey League improve its team divisions. Wired Science blogger Sam Arbesman explains how the algorithm works, and what the new divisions could look like.
Riak CS is a file system designed to be fully compatible with Amazon's popular cloud storage service, S3. It can be used to create private Amazon-style storage systems in your own data center, to build public services that compete with Amazon, or to power web applications of your own creation. And as of Wednesday, it's open source.
A collection of our favorite MIT hacks, from cars dragged onto buildings in the 1920s to a 250-foot-high building turned into a
Facebook has made significant changes to Graph Search in the two months since it launched, thanks to real-world testing by ordinary users. We take a look at some of the tweaks.
Computer-generated images are moving out of theaters and onto store shelves and catalog pages, thanks to new software that makes it nearly impossible to distinguish the real from the photorealistic.
As a blogger at Gawker, I helped Weev's Goatse Security expose a major AT&T security hole affecting iPad users. Now I'm revolted to find he's been turned into a scapegoat for corporate sloppiness.
Amanda Palmer is easy to hate. But when we criticize her, we think we need to take a long, hard look at exactly what we?re reacting to -- and why.
A prominent Navy thinker wants to do away with the massive ships that have long dominated the seas. What should replace them?
In this episode we?re talking about sprites, angry creatures like elves and fairies hell-bent on ruining your lawn and stealing your babies. It?s a bit like
Shane Carruth doesn't just make movies. He encrypts them with data that can take years for fans to unravel. Now the Primer director is back with a new film.
Android users can now, finally, get Up. A new app makes the health tracker work with phones running Ice Cream Sandwich or Jelly Bean.
A cast that includes James McAvoy (
U.S companies and government agencies can learn from the large-scale disruptions that have simultaneously hit several banks and media outlets in South Korea in the last 24 hours. Early analyses by security firms suggest that the attacks were carried out using previously known vulnerabilities and exploits. So while considerable attention is being paid to whether or not North Korea is behind the targeted attacks, the real lesson is that organizations have to address the vulnerabilities that leave them exposed, security analysts said. "It really doesn't matter if the attacker is a nation-state or a cybercriminal or a hacktivist or a bored teenage kid," said John Pescatore, director of emerging security trends at the SANS Institute in Bethesda, Md. "You have to make sure you are at least at the due-diligence level for the well-known critical security controls. If you close the well-known vulnerabilities, you can stop any attacker using those techniques."
. One thing that bothers me, however, is the startup screen that appears when you launch Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. It's a nice addition, and a quick way to access recent documents or create a new one using a template, but it's not how I like to work. Fortunately, it's fairly easy to configure Office to bypass that screen for the aforementioned three programs. Here's how, using Word as an example: 1. Run Word. Open a document, create a new one, or whatever. The goal is to move past the startup screen.
If you thought you had to pay an arm and a leg for a top-notch musical notation editor, think again. MuseScore is powerful, versatile, and free. It may not offer the bells and whistles provided by some of the paid competition, but the core functionality is there: WYSIWYG creation and editing, support for unlimited staves, unlimited score length, a plug-in architecture, and excellent-looking notation. The more I played with MuseScore, the more impressed I became. There's fine control over the size and spacing for nearly every object: clef, stave, accidental, performance mark, etc. that most users will need. It has MIDI input, Music XML import and export, its own internal sounds, and support for ASI0 (a low latency audio standard) and JACK MIDI (a free patch bay that works between MIDI programs), though not the more popular Rewire (another patch bay/signal router). If you're used to Sibelius or Finale, you'll probably feel right at home with MuseScore. I'd prefer a simple left-click to do something other than just drag the page around, but that's me. One area where the program hits the nail on the head is allowing you to drag note modifiers and performance markings directly to the notes they will operate on. Brilliant. Also brilliant is allowing users to redefine the keyboard shortcuts, though the process could be streamlined a bit. MuseScore is as challenged in the area of mouse editing as the rest of the notation industry, which has never seemed to fully grasp the drag-and-drop concept. But all in all, it's as easy for entering symbols and editing as the competition is.
Low-cost color lasers like the $329 (as of 03/20/2013) HP LaserJet Pro 200 color Printer M251nw are tempting for small-office users who see laser technology as familiar and reliable (never mind that has an even lower price tag and even better output quality, but it's a lot slower and has pricier toner. On looks alone, the M251nw could win a lot of fans. With a faux brushed-black-metal exterior (it's plastic, but convincing), and a flip-up, 3.5-inch touchscreen control panel, it's one of the handsomest small office laser printers to come down the pike in a while. The M251nw features all of the three major connection technologies: Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and USB. We installed using Wi-Fi with minimum fuss. There's both Wi-Fi Protected Setup and the standard setup wizard. HP’s ePrint cloud-printing services are another bonus, including features like remote printing via e-mail and access to Web-based apps and services. Paper handling features consist of a 150-sheet paper tray on the bottom of the unit, and an integrated 125-sheet output bin on the top--the classic small laser setup. Duplexing is manual, with step-by-step, onscreen prompts.
Do you have a video that needs converting? You know, one that you downloaded or encoded in a particular format that's not compatible with a particular device? Google around and you can find a smattering of freeware utilities designed to convert files to different formats, but they tend to be out of date and of varying quality. My thought: Why not get a commercial product if you can, especially if the price is the same? . It normally sells for $49.95.
The Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) is going to upgrade its supercomputer with Nvidia GPUs to more accurately predict the weather in the steep mountains of the Swiss Alps. team of the CSCS, on Wednesday. "Switzerland has one of the most complex topographies in the world," he said. Steep mountains can cause a difference in weather patterns from valley to valley, making it very hard to make accurate predictions, he said. More computing power is needed to tackle the problem. ]
Google has fully implemented a security feature that ensures a person looking up a website isn't inadvertently directed to a fake one. The Internet company has run its own free public Domain Name System (DNS) lookup service, called Public DNS, since 2009. DNS lookups are required to translate a domain name, such as www.idg.com, into an IP address that can be called into a browser. But DNS systems can be tampered with by hackers. In an attack called "cache poisoning," a DNS server is hacked and modified so that a user looking for www.idg.com is directed to a different website. ISPs and other network operators have been slowly implementing DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC), which use public key cryptography to digitally "sign" the DNS records for websites.
, Utopia Documents is actually different from all three, and even sports a Mendeley integration. On the surface, Utopia Documents 2.2.1 looks like a PDF reader, and while you can certainly use it as your main reader, that's not its best point. It lacks simple features such as annotations, highlights, and so forth. Its strength lies in the sidebar, where you'll find extra information about every article you load, helping you research a subject, find related articles, create citations, and more. Start by loading a PDF from your computer, or pasting a PDF URL. Utopia Documents works only with PDFs. Several seconds after loading an article, information will begin to fill the sidebar. This will change from article to article, but can include the article's metadata, a formatted citation in one of seven available formats (the BibTeX one kept returning "Internal Server Error" when I tried it), an Altmetric rating, telling you how much online discussion this article is attracting, related articles from Mendeley, the article's open access status, and if the article itself is open access, the full reference list, complete with links. On the bottom left corner you'll find most of the document controls. From here you can toggle the pager for quick browsing through the article; the sidebar; and the figure browser, whichlets you flip through all the article's figures. The figure browser is a brilliant feature—sometimes the figures are all you want to see—but it doesn't always catch all of them in every article, so don't trust it blindly.
With its new Grid VGX software, Nvidia is aiming to tear down the performance barrier that keeps graphics-intensive applications from running on virtual desktops. The company detailed how it plans make its mark on running graphics remotely in the data center at the GPU Technology Conference, which takes place this week in San Jose. It's working with partners such as Hewlett-Packard and VMware on the effort. At the heart of this push is the company's Grid VGX software, which is a suite of technologies that enables improved graphics performance in virtualized systems. The software, for example, enables virtual desktop solutions to capture and encode remote streams directly on its Kepler-based Grid K1 and K2 graphics boards, which were first announced last year. On Tuesday, the company said the cards will be used in servers customized for hosting virtual desktops such as the Dell PowerEdge R720; the iDataPlex dx360 M4 from IBM; and the eighth generation of Hewlett-Packard's ProLiant WS460c. On the software side, Nvidia is working with Citrix Systems, Microsoft and VMware.
Once again, Microsoft has opened its coffers to app developers, offering them up to $2,000 to build new Windows 8 and Windows Phone apps. Microsoft will pay U.S. developers $100 per app published in the Windows Store and Windows Phone Store, with a limit of 10 published apps per store. The company is pitching it as a temporary promotion, running the offer through June 30, or for the first 10,000 published apps, whichever comes first. . —to the tune of $60,000 to $600,000 per app.