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strawberryshakes writes "The death knell for IE6 was sounded a couple of years ago, but seems like some people just can't let go. Many UK government departments are still using IE6, which is so old — 11 years old to be exact — it can't cope with social media — which the government is trying to get its staff to use more to engage with citizens."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

nonprofiteer writes "The Pentagon is increasingly transforming the military into an unmanned force, taking soldiers out of harm's way and replacing them with drones and robots. In 2011, it spent $6 billion on unmanned systems. The problem is that the unmanned systems don't work well together thanks to contractors building proprietary control systems (to lock government into exclusive relationships and to make extra money). A company called DreamHammer plans to have a solution to this — a universal remote control that could integrate all robots and drones into one control system. It would save money and allow anyone to build apps for drones. 'DreamHammer CTO Chris Diebner compares it with a smartphone OS — on which drones and features for those drones can be run like apps. Of course, Ballista is doing something on a much larger scale. It means that it takes fewer people to fly more drones and that new features can be rolled out without the need to develop and build a new version of a Predator, for example.'"

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From the Loop Holes dept.:
The HTC One X for AT&T and Evo 4G LTE for Sprint already bear the distinction of being the first Android devices to face an import block at US Customs for potentially infringing an Apple patent, but the ignominy may be fleeting: sources tell us that HTC's US devices use a customized version of Android that removes the offending "data tapping" feature. That's confirmed by our own examination of an AT&T One X and Sprint Evo 4G LTE, neither of which exhibit the key behavior excluded from importation into the US by the International Trade Commission, and which both include a new settings screen not present in the international One X.

From the Direct dept.:
Google plans to give multiple mobile-device makers early access to new releases of Android and to sell those devices directly to consumers, said people familiar with the matter. That is a shift from Google's previous practice, when it joined with with only one hardware maker at a time to produce "lead devices," before releasing the software to other device makers. Those lead devices were then sold to consumers through wireless carriers or retailers.

The expansion of direct sales marks a bid to exert more control over key features and apps that run on Android-powered phones and tablets, thus reducing the influence of wireless carriers over such devices, these people said. Wireless carriers typically handle marketing and sales of devices and thus can exert some control over the services that run on them.

From the From on High dept.:
"My view is that broad categories treated pejoratively are going to lead us toward bad solutions," Michael told us. "People say 'We know all business method patents are bogus, so let's just get rid of them.'" He added that people make similar arguments about software and medical diagnostic patents. "I don't think that's a constructive way to proceed. Certainly there are software patents out there that are no good, and that's a shame. We've gotta clean those out. But I'm against these kinds of broad, polemical ways of proceeding."

Michel did concede that software patents don't appear to be very helpful to the software industry. "Software is way less dependent on patents—maybe not dependent at all except in certain areas. How much [patents] retard [software] I'm not so sure. I hear a lot of anecdotes, a lot of scare stories. I'm a facts and figures guy. I'm not for anecdotes and assumptions."

From the Not This S**t Again dept.:
The company behind the Firefox Web browser says Microsoft Corp. is hindering its ability to distribute the software on some devices being designed for the next version of the Windows operating system.

Mozilla Corp.'s contention focuses on future tablets and personal computers that exploit chip designs licensed from ARM Holdings which are being supported for the first time in the next version of Microsoft's flagship Windows software.

From the Be Proud dept.:
May 8th, 2012 is a day to celebrate in The Netherlands as it becomes the first country in Europe to protect its citizens by enshrining net neutrality into law.

The Netherlands is also implementing privacy protections for users against wiretapping and disconnection by the Internet Service Providers (ISPs), which will no longer be able to interrupt traffic of users unless it is proven to be in the public interest.

From the dept.:
Apache OpenOffice 3.4 is available for download free of charge. OpenOffice 3.4 features:

-word processing, spreadsheets, presentation graphics, databases, drawing, and mathematical editing applications support for Windows, Linux (32-bit and 64-bit) and Macintosh operating environments
-native language support for English, Arabic, Czech, German, Spanish, French, Galician, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese
-improved ODF support, including new ODF 1.2 encryption options and new spreadsheet functions
-enhanced pivot table support in Calc
-enhanced graphics, including line caps, shear transformations and native support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)
-improvements in performance and quality

From the He Said dept.:
The number one iOS carrier duking it out with the company behind the world's most popular smartphone operating system. Last month, Google's lead for the Android Open Source Project, Jean-Baptiste Queru, more or less blamed carriers (see comments) for Android's upgrade woes. Yesterday, AT&T's CEO Randall Stephenson retaliated, blaming Google for the delays. And yes, Google already responded to that, too.

Last month, Jean-Baptiste Queru pointed fingers at the carriers, stating the carriers' approval processes for updates is what's causing the delays. Considering the swiftness with which small, non-funded independent developers can support devices, this doesn't seem like quite a stretch. The massive delays caused by carriers with Windows Phone 7 updates further confirm this line of reasoning.

From the Blow dept.:
In what could be a major blow to Android, Google's mobile operating system, a San Francisco jury issued a verdict today that the company broke copyright laws when it used Java APIs to design the system. The ruling is a partial victory for Oracle, which accused Google of violating copyright law.

But the jury couldn't reach agreement on a second critical issue—whether Google had a valid "fair use" defense when it used the APIs. Google has asked for a mistrial based on the incomplete verdict, and that issue will be briefed later this week.

From the Linux dept.:
Microsoft has drastically overhauled the network running its Skype voice-over-IP service, replacing peer-to-peer client machines with thousands of Linux boxes that have been hardened against the most common types of hack attacks, a security researcher said.

The change, which Immunity Security's Kostya Kortchinsky said occurred about two months ago, represents a major departure from the design that has powered Skype for the past decade. Since its introduction in 2003, the network has consisted of "supernodes" made up of regular users who had sufficient bandwidth, processing power, and other system requirements to qualify. These supernodes then transferred data with other supernodes in a peer-to-peer fashion. At any given time, there were typically a little more than 48,000 clients that operated this way.

From the SMRT dept.:
EdX is a joint partnership between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University to offer online learning to millions of people around the world. EdX will offer Harvard and MIT classes online for free. Through this partnership, the institutions aim to extend their collective reach to build a global community of online learners and to improve education for everyone.

An anonymous reader writes "Google+ is a lonely place. At least according to a new study that paints the social networking site as a virtual tumbleweed town. Using information culled from the public timelines of 40,000 randomly selected members, data analysis firm RJMetrics found that the Google+ population, which currently numbers 170 million, is largely disengaged, with user activity rapidly decaying—at least when it comes to public posts. According to RJMetrics, 30 percent of first-time Google+ public posters don't post again. Of those who make five public posts, only 15 percent post again. The average time lapse between posts is 12 days, and RJMetrics cites a cohort analysis showing that members tend to make fewer public posts with each successive month. And the response to public posts on Google+ is extremely weak. The average post receives fewer than one reply, fewer than one '+1' (the equivalent to Facebook's 'Like'), and fewer than one re-share — basically most posts in the study did not garner any response."

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jones_supa writes "RunCore announces the global launch of its InVincible solid state drive, designed for mission-critical fields such as aerospace or military. The device improves upon a normal SSD by having two strategies for the drive to quickly render itself blank. First method goes through the disk, overwriting all data with garbage. Second one is less discreet and lets the smoke out of the circuitry by driving overcurrent to the NAND chips. Both ways can be ignited with a single push of a button, allowing James Bond -style rapid response to the situation on the field."

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First time accepted submitter Arker writes "A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction late Wednesday to block provisions of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act that would allow the military to indefinitely detain anyone it accuses of knowingly or unknowingly supporting terrorism. The Obama administration had argued, inter alia, that the plaintiffs, including whistleblower and transparency advocate Daniel Ellsberg and Icelandic Member of Parliament Birgitta Jonsdottir lacked standing, but Judge Katherine Forrest didnt buy it. Given recent statements from the administration, it seems safe to say this will be the start of a long court battle."

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CloudLinux to Announce I/O Limits at WHD.INDIA
Seattle Post Intelligencer
Cloud Linux Inc., an innovative software company dedicated to serving the needs of hosting service providers, will exhibit at WHD.india and WHD.asia. At the conferences, CloudLinux will demonstrate I/O limits—the ability to limit read and write ...

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An anonymous reader writes "Not a single judge was fooled by the chatbots in the 2012 Loebner Prize, which was won by the bot Chip Vivant. According to a journalist who was a human decoy in this year's Turing Test, interactions with the humans was a tad robotic while the bots went off on crazy tangents talking about being a cat and offering condolences for the death of a pet dragon."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OStatic: While waiting for the Mandriva management to decide the future direction of the distribution, the community is taking matters into their own hands and beginning the planning stages for the next release,

An anonymous reader writes "The use of CCTV cameras for physical surveillance of all kinds of environments has become so pervasive that most of us don't give the devices a second thought anymore. But, those individuals and organizations who actually use and control them should be aware that most of them come with default settings that make them vulnerable to outside attacks. According to Gotham Digital Science researcher Justin Cacak, standalone CCTV video surveillance systems by MicroDigital, HIVISION, CTRing, and many other rebranded devices are not only shipped with remote access enabled by default, but also with preconfigured default accounts and passwords that are banal and easy to guess."

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Wind River Recognized as Global Embedded Leader
MarketWatch (press release)
--Company's market share for traditional real-time operating system and embedded Linux was double that of the closest competitor. --Ability to provide a comprehensive portfolio solidifies Wind River's position as an embedded market leader.
Senior Software Engineer - RTOS, C, Linux, VxWorks, Open SourceElectronicsWeekly.com

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