“Dogged by scandal, the Los Angeles Police Department is looking beyond human judgment to technology to identify bad cops. This month, the agency began using a $35 million computer system that tracks complaints and other telling data about officers – then alerts top supervisors to possible signs of misconduct.”
I guess this answers the ancient question of who will police the police.
“Sony BMG, the world’s second-biggest record label, has agreed to pay $10m (£5.7m) and stop paying radio station employees to play its artists’ songs. The settlement follows an investigation into “pay for play” practices in the music industry, conducted by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. The probe found “air time is often determined by undisclosed payoffs,” said Mr Spitzer on Monday.”
And they blame P2P users for not buying the crap they try to cram down our throats like this… Jesus!
“Developers and designers are being encouraged to come up with innovative ways of using TV and radio schedules by taking part in a BBC competition. The competition, announced at the Open Tech conference in London, has been organised by the BBC’s backstage.bbc.co.uk developer network.
Backstage lets people remix the BBC’s content to make new applications. The latest content release is seven-day listings information for TV and radio, in a format called TV Anytime.”
BBC
some links added
So, when’s YLE going to release their schedules like this?
“ITviikko, one of the largest popular weekly IT publications in Finland, seems to really have a beef with open source software and anything non-microsoft.”
I’ve noticed this too. It looks like they’re seizing every mention of every vulnerability or delay in OSS and try and make big headlines from them. If selling news is what they do, that’s somewhat understandable, but it’s not what I’d call quality journalism. To put it in perspective, the tabloids poking around every minor detail of celebrities’ lives do the same, and there are people who buy it, but I wouldn’t.
Of course, they’d probably claim they’re just trying not to be biased, when reporting vulnerabilities of both OSS and proprietary software, but I’m not too keen to read up on every tiny vulnerability of proprietary software either. What matters is the severity of the vulnerability, who is affected (all users or just some of them – this is why the Greasemonkey vulnerability wasn’t big news IMO) and how soon can it be fixed.
By these standards I believe the number of newsworthy OSS vulnerabilities would be significantly lower than it would be for example for Microsoft, as opposed to them being equal. If this is true, having equal coverage for them actually means the news source is biased.
“Multimedia search firm Blinkx is the latest to use Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to make it easier for people to find the web video and audio they want. Users can look for any word uttered in news videos, podcasts and video blogs. […] Blinkx’s service uses smart voice recognition technology to scan video and audio it finds on the web. A searchable transcript is then automatically generated.”
BBC
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“Pohjois-Pohjanmaalla Pudasjärvellä asusteleva maakotkaperhe on saanut valtavan suosion internetissä. […] Nettisivuilla oli perjantai-iltapäivään mennessä vieraillut yli 80 000 uteliasta. Sivuston osoite julkaistiin keskiviikkona. […]
Parhaimmillaan uusia kävijöitä on tullut viidessä minuutissa 600. Sivusto ehti myös tukkeutua hetkeksi, mutta sivuston pitäjät pyysivät lisää kapasiteettia Oulun Puhelimelta ruuhkaa purkamaan.”
HS Verkkoliite via Ampparit.com
linkitys omani
“Microsoft has acknowledged that it is working on a patch for a potentially serious security hole in fully patched versions of Windows XP Service Pack 2. […] In an advisory posted at SecurityProtocols.com, [a private security] researcher described the issue as a remote kernel denial-of-service flaw affecting XP SP2, with the default firewall turned on. […] the flaw resides in the Windows “Remote Desktop” feature that allows XP users to remotely control computers from another office, from home or while traveling.”
“As you’ve no doubt noticed, we’ve been down for a few days. We took the site down to investigate an attack on the site. It appears that a part of Spread Firefox was hacked in an attempt to use it to send out spam. It doesn’t look like the attacker accessed any personal data on the site, but to be safe, we’re encouraging all of our users to log in and change their passwords. If you have an account with Spread Firefox, you probably received an email about this with instructions for updating your password.”