Jul 03, 2009 01:38PM

Professor Gets 4 Years in Prison for Sharing Drone Plans With Students

Hugh Pickens writes "Retired University of Tennessee Professor Dr. John Reece Roth has been sentenced to four years in prison after he allowed a Chinese graduate student to see sensitive information on Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones. In 2004, the company Roth helped found, Atmospheric Glow Technologies, won a US Air Force contract to develop a plasma actuator that could help reduce drag on the wings of drones, such as the ones the military uses. Under the contract, for which Roth was reportedly paid $6,000, he was prohibited from sharing sensitive data with foreign nationals. Despite warnings from his university's Export Control Officer, in 2006, Roth took a laptop containing sensitive plans with him on a lecture tour in China and also allowed graduate students Xin Dai of China and Sirous Nourgostar of Iran to work on the project. 'The illegal export of restricted military data represents a serious threat to national security,' says David Kris of the US Department of Justice. 'We know that foreign governments are actively seeking this information for their own military development. Today's sentence should serve as a warning to anyone who knowingly discloses restricted military data in violation of our laws.' During his trial, Roth testified that he was unaware that hiring the graduate students was a violation of his contract. 'This whole thing has not helped me, it has not helped the university,' said Roth. 'And it has probably not helped this country, either.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jul 03, 2009 12:47PM

Copyright Should Encourage Derivative Works

Techdirt has an interesting look at copyright and the idea that an author is the originator of a new work. Instead, the piece suggests that all works are in some way based on the works of others (even our own copyright law), and the system should be much more encouraging of "remixing" work into new, unique experiences. "Friedman also points back to another recent post where he discusses the nature of content creation, based on a blog post by Rene Kita. In it, she points out that remixing and creating through collaboration and building on the works of others has always been the norm. It's what we do naturally. It's only in the last century or so, when we reached a means of recording, manufacturing and selling music — which was limited to just those with the machinery and capital to do it, that copyright was suddenly brought out to 'protect' such things."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jul 03, 2009 11:55AM

Open Source Facing a Difficult Battle for Cloud Relevance

A recent eulogy for open source's relevance to cloud computing by Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady caught the attention of Matt Asay, who breaks down the difficulty of this David and Goliath problem. "In a world where horsepower matters more than the software feeding those 'horses,' in terms of the entry cost to compete, and where big vendors like Amazon and Google are already divvying up the market, the odds of a small-fry, open-source start-up challenging 'Goliath' are slim. It's not a new argument: Nick Carr has been suggesting for some time that only a few, big companies can afford relevance in this hardware-intensive business. Given this fact, O'Grady thinks the best we can hope for (and he thinks it's pretty important) is 'a loose coalition or confederation of [open-source] projects and vendors that will together comprise an increasingly viable top to bottom alternative to some of the cloud providers today.' He includes projects like Puppet (Reductive Labs) and Hadoop in this mix, but is careful to point out that he doesn't see a full-fledged, open-source alternative seriously challenging the closed platforms of Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and the other mega-clouds."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jul 03, 2009 11:02AM

Phoenix Lander Discovers Nighttime Snowfall on Mars

Many outlets are reporting on the recently released results of the various experiments and observations of NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander. Most notable is the discovery of nighttime snowfall on the planet, lending credibility to the idea of a hypothesized active water cycle based on earlier data collection. "The papers rely on evidence from a variety of the instruments on the lander, and the description of the data provides an impressive catalog of the various ways that Phoenix could prod and query the Martian pole. In the months before Martian winter shut the lander down, it managed to dig a dozen trenches, taking soil samples from each. These samples went into wet and dry chemistry labs, had their conductivity tested, and were even examined using an atomic force microscope. Meanwhile, cameras and a LIDAR system (a laser-based range detector) scanned the surroundings. The overall conclusion is that the northern pole has an active water cycle. This had been suggested by a variety of evidence from orbital sensors, as well early images returned from Phoenix. It's also not a huge shock, given the seasonal growth and retreat of the polar ice cap. Still, Phoenix provided some significant details on the cycling of water in the area where it landed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jul 03, 2009 10:11AM

Seattle Data Center Outage Disrupts E-Commerce

1sockchuck writes "A major power outage at Seattle telecom hub Fisher Plaza has knocked payment processing provider Authorize.net offline for hours, leaving thousands of web sites unable to take credit cards for online sales. The Authorize site is still down, but its Twitter account attributes the outage to a fire, while AdHost calls it a 'significant power event.' Authorize.net is said to be trying to resume processing from a backup data center, but there's no clear ETA on when Fisher Plaza will have power again."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jul 03, 2009 10:40AM

10 humor sites sure to make you LOL

Bored with Pearl, the cursing toddler landlord demanding rent money? Not amused by those cutesy pictures of cats with the baby-speak captions? Replenish your list of favorite bookmarks with these 10 new or lesser-known humor Web sites, including some that find comedy in real life.

Jul 03, 2009 01:06PM

Unlocked cell phones coming to U.S.

Nokia and Sony Ericsson are targeting the U.S. with a new set of unlocked phones. But without hefty carrier subsidies, will they ever be able to crack the U.S. market?

Jul 03, 2009 12:25PM

Dell turns netbooks into navigation devices

Say hello to your latest personal navigation device: a netbook. Dell plans to introduce a GPS and Wi-Fi card that can be integrated into the company's netbooks to turn them into gizmos that can offer turn-by-turn direction as well as any Garmin or TomTom.

Jul 03, 2009 09:55AM

Fake Tamiflu out-spams Viagra on Web

The number of Internet scammers offering fake anti-swine flu drug, Tamiflu has surpassed those selling counterfeit Viagra, a UK body said Friday.

Jul 02, 2009 06:08PM

MySpace suicide case conviction overturned

A federal judge tentatively overturned the conviction of a Missouri woman accused of using MySpace to deceive a teenage girl who eventually committed suicide, a U.S. attorney's spokesman told CNN.

Jul 03, 2009 01:30PM

Microsoft Keeps Beating a Dead Browser

Analysis: If Redmond keeps trying to foist IE8 on the world, people will start to hurl.

Jul 03, 2009 01:21PM

BlackBerry vs. iPhone 3.0: Smackdown Revisited

After pitting RIM's BlackBerry Bold against Apple's iPhone in May, it's time for a rematch ? iPhone 3G takes on BlackBerry 9000 Bold. Place your bets now.

Jul 03, 2009 12:31PM

Wanna be @the_real_shaq? That'll be $50,000...

For a (small?) fee, uSocial promises to bring you untold amounts of Twitter popularity by acquiring you legions of new followers. So how much is a Stephen Colbert going for these days anyway?

Jul 03, 2009 11:40AM

IPhone 3GS Heats Up, DOJ Takes Aim at Google

The iPhone scored quite a few headlines related to overheating problems with the 3GS this week. Depending on whom you believe, those issues are either real...

Jul 03, 2009 10:35AM

Well-honed Attacks Sneak Under the Radar

Examples of 'bait files' show that the targeted attacks may be hard to spot.