TPile

Bloggers: If you suddenly find Air Force officers leaving barbed comments after one of your posts, don’t be surprised. They’re just following orders.

Steve Jobs and three major labels come to terms on a deal to make music available on iTunes without DRM. Consumers can choose between three price levels instead of the “any song for 99 cents” model the store implemented on day one.

Astronomers have no explanation for a mysterious bright flash in space observed by several telescopes. Suggestions range from a collision between a white dwarf star and a black hole to an exotic star made out of hypothetical “mirror matter,” but none fit the phenomenon, according to scientists at the American Astronomical Society meeting.

There’s a moral panic style study being released that claims that many teens “display risky behavior” on MySpace. Of course, when you look at the details, it’s not quite so fear-inducing at all. Basically, some kids talk about drinking, drugs and sex online. That’s nothing new. But the way this study is being presented, it makes it sound as if the risky behavior is the fact that kids are talking about this stuff. The article doesn’t talk about the actual drugs and sex so much as the talking about it, as if that’s the problem:

Many young people who use social networking sites such as News Corp’s MySpace do not realize how public they are and may be opening themselves to risks

That seems backwards to me. It would seem a lot better to find out that kids are actually talking about this stuff openly, where they can (hopefully) get good advice to keep themselves safe, rather than keeping quiet and experimenting totally in secret. Yes, there definitely are some risks involved in talking about this stuff publicly. For years, we’ve wondered what will happen when the MySpace generation runs for office, and we’ve also seen how social networking profiles can be used against an individual in pursuing a career. Of course, there are some who wonder if this widespread openness will lead to a more accepting population. For example the fact that Barack Obama used cocaine at one point in his life was barely mentioned at all during the campaign — in part because he had openly admitted to it years earlier. It’s only the surprise “gotcha” type info that seems to cause real problems.

That isn’t to say that kids today shouldn’t be at least aware of the potential consequences of over-sharing information, but I worry that a study like the one being discussed here leads to eventual misplaced blame and worries over a problem that might not be nearly as significant as some make it out to be.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

DRM has become a contentious issue in the gaming world, and now the Federal Trade Commission may be stepping in. The agency will hold a town hall meeting on March 25. Ars explores why the government may need to get involved, and how to get your voice heard.

Read More…

snydeq writes “Security researchers from Invisible Things Lab have created software that can ‘compromise the integrity’ of software loaded using Intel’s vPro Trusted Execution Technology, which is supposed to help protect software from being seen or tampered with by other programs on the machine. The researchers say they have created a two-stage attack, with the first stage exploiting a bug in Intel’s system software. The second stage relies on a design flaw in the TXT technology itself (PDF). The researchers plan to give more details on their work at the Black Hat DC security conference next month.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "Astronaut Dave Bowman may have found the HAL-9000 more believable had the Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer been equipped with the technology described in IBM’s new patent for Generating paralinguistic phenomena via markup in text-to-speech synthesis. In the patent, IBM describes how you can dupe others into believing they’re dealing with a real, live human being by using markup language to feign sadness, anger, laughter, filled pauses (uh, um), breaths, coughs and hesitations (mmm). Here’s an example that shows how to make a more lovable HAL: <prosody style=”bad news”>I’m cough sorry Dave sigh, I’m afraid I can’t do that.<prosody>"

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

There’s really no mystery here since the network was already live, we’ve discussed the pricing, and customers have already been signing up for service for weeks — but Clearwire’s “Clear” Mobile WiMax network went officially live in Portland today. A refresher: the mobile version comes in four flavors, all of which offer 4Mbps/384kbps connectivity, but with different bandwidth caps ($30/month for 200MB, $40/month for 2GB and $50/month for unlimited). The home plans come in three flavors with no caps: 768kbps/128kbps for $20, 3Mbps/384bps for $30, and 6Mbps/512kbps for $50. Which market will launch next isn’t clear, the company delaying Chicago and DC launches, after recently announcing a sour economy may delay the network build.
read comment(s)

Available only for Mac OS X at first, the new version will add screen-sharing capabilities to the app’s voice, video, and chat communications features.

Renowned Asian designers now helm two of the U.S.’s traditionally Eurocentric architecture schools. Here’s what they’re teaching the new generation of American architects.