oxide7 writes "Starting from August 1, Chinese Internet users will have to register using their real names for playing online games, China Daily reported on Saturday. The regulation, issued by the Ministry of Culture on June 22, is said to be part of a nationwide campaign to improve management of the virtual gaming industry and protect minors from unwholesome content. It applies to all multiplayer role-playing and social networking games."

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theodp writes "Remember those old Lifecall commercials? Well, you've come a long way, Grandma! The NY Times reports on a raft of new technology that's making it possible for adult children to remotely monitor to a stunningly precise degree the daily movements and habits of their aging parents. The purpose is to provide enough supervision to allow elderly people to stay in their homes rather than move to an assisted-living facility or nursing home. Systems like GrandCare, BeClose, QuietCare, and MedMinder allow families to keep tabs on Mom and Dad's whereabouts, and make sure they take their meds. Perhaps Zynga can make a game out of all this — GeriatricVille?"

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Computerworld: "Once thought to be unhackable, the Android phone is anything but, according to researchers presenting at Black Hat 2010."

An anonymous reader writes "At the annual SIGGRAPH show, Microsoft Research showed new technology that can remove the blur from images on your camera or phone using on-board sensors — the same sensors currently added to the iPhone 4. No more blurry low light photos!"

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pitchpipe writes "A puzzling pattern in the cosmic rays bombarding Earth from space has been discovered by an experiment buried deep under the ice of Antarctica. ... It turns out these particles are not arriving uniformly from all directions. The new study detected an overabundance of cosmic rays coming from one part of the sky, and a lack of cosmic rays coming from another." The map of this uneven distribution comes from the IceCube neutrino observatory last mentioned several days ago.

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wooferhound writes "Sophisticated synthesizers and computer-manipulated recordings are increasingly taking over orchestras. Sounding almost like real players, while costing much less, they're especially popular with provincial or touring companies. But until mid-July — when 'West Side Story's' producers announced that a synthesizer was replacing three live violinists and two cellists, or half the orchestra's string section — staff violinist Paul Woodiel thought that at least the classics would be immune to the trend. There are computer programs able to read and play back music scores — a boon to composers who can now hear their work as they write — and software allowing conductors to control the tempo of the machine, in the same way that they direct live players."

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From the Owning What's Yours dept.:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation drove three deep wedges into the US prohibition on breaking DRM today. EFF had applied to the Copyright Office to grant exemptions permitting the cracking of DRM in three cases: first, to "jailbreak" a mobile device, such as an iPhone, where DRM is used to prevent phone owners from running software of their own choosing; second, to allow video remix artists to break the DRM on DVDs in order to take short excerpts for mashups posted to YouTube and other sharing sites; finally EFF got the Copyright Office to renew its ruling that made it illegal to unlock cellphones so that they can be used with any carrier.

From the Buy Once, Get Reamed Everywhere dept.:
Mom-and-pop repair shops in Massachusetts are pushing a bill that would require auto manufacturers to provide, at a price, all the diagnostic and software information they make available to their dealerships.

Massachusetts would become the first state to approve the so-called auto right-to-repair law. The Senate recently passed it, and it's pending in the House. Industry observers say passage of the bill in Massachusetts could drive similar legislative efforts in other states.

From the Cloudiness, Chance of Openness dept.:
OpenStack is an open-source cloud platform designed to foster the emergence of technology standards and cloud interoperability. The initial components being offered through this project include the code that powers our Cloud Files (available today) and Cloud Servers (expected available late 2010). Leaders in the technology industry and other stakeholders support the project and are expected to help us drive a deployable, completely open cloud solution.

What does an open cloud mean for you?
Prevents vendor lock-in
Increases flexibility in deployment for a highly elastic commodity cloud
Offers a bigger, more robust ecosystem for more tools, better capabilities and a stronger platform
Gives you the freedom to decide how you want your cloud
Drives greater industry standards
Increases the speed of innovation in cloud technologies

From the uh huh dept.:
Russian publication Vedomosti reported on Wednesday that Microsoft had also given the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) access to Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2, Microsoft Office 2010 and Microsoft SQL Server source code, with hopes of improving Microsoft sales to the Russian state.

The agreement will allow state bodies to study the source code and develop cryptography for the Microsoft products through the Science-Technical Centre 'Atlas', a government body controlled by the Ministry of Communications and Press, according to Vedomosti.

Microsoft Russia president Nikolai Pryanishnikov told Vedomosti that employees of Atlas and the FSB will be able to share conclusions about Microsoft products.

From the Hands Off! dept.:
Brazil has just created the best-ever implementation of WCT. In Brazil's version of the law, you can break DRM without breaking the law, provided you're not also committing a copyright violation. And what's more, any rightsholder who adds a DRM that restricts things that are allowed by Brazilian copyright laws ("fair dealing" or "fair use") faces a fine.

From the dept.:
On behalf of the Python development team, I'm jocund to announce the final release of Python 2.7.

Python 2.7 will be the last major version in the 2.x series. However, it will also have an extended period of bugfix maintenance.

2.7 includes many features that were first released in Python 3.1. The faster io module, the new nested with statement syntax, improved float repr, set literals, dictionary views, and the memoryview object have been backported from 3.1. Other features include an ordered dictionary implementation, unittests improvements, a new sysconfig module, auto-numbering of fields in the str/unicode format method,
and support for ttk Tile in Tkinter.

From the FoxVille dept.:
Just three days after adding plug-in crash protection to Firefox, Mozilla rushed out another release because people playing FarmVille on Facebook complained that their browser was shutting down the game. Although complaints about Firefox's quick killing of hung plug-ins were not limited to FarmVille, that game was the squeaky wheel that got the update grease.

From the Haters Gonna Mitigate the Hate dept.:
Mozilla Firefox 3.6.4 went to general release today. The big new feature in this release is out-of-process plugins (OOPP). This means things like Flash, Java, QuickTime, etc., all run in separate processes, so when Flash decides to crash, it won't take your browser out with it. If Flash starts consuming all the CPU it can find, you can kill it without nuking your browser session. I've been using this feature since it was in the 'nightly build' stage, and it was still more stable than 3.6.3, just because Flash was isolated."

From the Good Riddance dept.:
udge Ted Stewart has ruled for Novell and against SCO. Novell's claim for declaratory judgment is granted; SCO's claims for specific performance and breach of the implied covenant of good fair and fair dealings are denied. Also SCO's motion for judgment as a matter of law or for a new trial: denied. SCO is entitled to waive, at its sole discretion, claims against IBM, Sequent and other SVRX licensees.
CASE CLOSED!

Maybe I should say cases closed. The door has slammed shut on the SCO litigation machine. The judge writes in the Memorandum Decision and Order about SCOsource, "Finally, while SCO's witnesses testified that the copyrights were 'required' for SCO to run its SCOsource licensing program, this was not something that SCO ever acquired from Novell." He totally got it. He noticed Darl McBride admitted that SCO didn't need the copyrights.

From the MUbuntu dept.:
Canonical is preparing a version of the Ubuntu OS for tablet computers as the company looks to extend its presence in the mobile space, a company executive said.

Tablets with the Ubuntu OS could become available late in winter 2011, said Chris Kenyon, Canonical's vice president of OEM services. The OS will be a lightweight version of Linux with a simplified, touch-friendly user interface.

hasanabbas1987 writes "It's just been a few months since a 45-gigapixel panorama of Dubai claimed the title of world's largest digital photograph, but it's now already been well and truly ousted — the new king in town is this 70-gigapixel, 360-degree panorama of Budapest. As with other multi-gigapixel images, this one was no easy feat, and involved two 25-megapixel Sony A900 cameras fitted with 400mm Minolta lenses and 1.4X teleconverters, a robotic camera mount from 360world that got the shooting done over the course of two days, and two solid days of post-processing that resulted in a single 200GB file — not to mention a 15-meter-long printed copy of the photograph for good measure. Of course, what's most impressive is the photo itself [Note: requires Silverlight]."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Developer.com: "The PHP community has never been one to shy away from bending their favorite language more ways than a shopping mall pretzel, and as the ten wild projects introduced in this article indicate, the fervor for experimentation is as strong as ever!"

We're approaching the dog days of summer in the northern hemisphere, and tech news shows no signs of cooling down.
Apple loses big in DRM ruling: jailbreaks are "fair use": Every three years, the Library of Congress approves a handful of exemptions to the DMCA, allowing consumers to break or bypass DRM in particular instances.

read more

astroengine writes "After repeated calls from NASA to wake up Mars Exploration Rover Spirit from its low-energy hibernation mode, mission control is beginning to realize the ill-fated robot may never wake up again. After getting stuck in a sand trap in Gusev Crater and then switching into hibernation in March, rover operators were hopeful that the beached Spirit might yet be saved. Alas, this is looking more and more unlikely. In a statement, NASA said: 'Based on models of Mars' weather and its effect on available power, mission managers believe that if Spirit responds, it most likely will be in the next few months. However, there is a very distinct possibility Spirit may never respond.'" Related xkcd strip, in case the headline wasn't anthropomorphic enough for you.

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