JetLib News

ZuchinniOne writes “With Ubisoft’s fantastically awful new DRM you must be online and logged in to their servers to play the games you buy. Not only was this DRM broken the very first day it was released, but now their authentication servers have failed so absolutely that no-one who legally bought their games can play them. ‘At around 8am GMT, people began to complain in the Assassin’s Creed 2 forum that they couldn’t access the Ubisoft servers and were unable to play their games.’ One can only hope that this utter failure will help to stem the tide of bad DRM.”

Source: Ubisoft’s Authentication Servers Go Down

timothy writes “Anyone skeevy and devious enough can buy online an ATM skimmer from some underhanded maker of same, but why not cut out the middleman, and just take the cash directly? (Also, if you’re going to attempt to stop him, can I have your watch when you are dead?)”

Source: Sumo Wrestler Steals Cash Machine From Moscow Shop

Hugh Pickens writes “The NY Times has an interesting article about Human-flesh search engines — renrou sousuo yinqing — that have become a phenomenon in China: they are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath. The goal is to get the targets of a search fired from their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, or run out of town. It’s crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online — with offline results. ‘In the United States, traditional media are still playing the key role in setting the agenda for the public,’ says Jin Liwen. ‘But in China, you will see that a lot of hot topics, hot news or events actually originate from online discussions.’ In one well known case, when a video appeared in China of a woman stomping a cat to death with the sharp point of her high heel, the human flesh search engine tracked the kitten killer’s home to the town of Luobei in Heilongjiang Province, in the far northeast, and her name — Wang Jiao — was made public, as were her phone number and her employer. ‘Wang Jiao was affected a lot,’ says one Luobei resident. ‘She left town and went somewhere else.’ The kitten-killer case didn’t just provide revenge; it helped turn the human-flesh search engine into a national phenomenon. Searches have also been directed against cheating spouses, corrupt government officials, amateur pornography makers, Chinese citizens who are perceived as unpatriotic, journalists who urge a moderate stance on Tibet and rich people who try to game the Chinese system.”

Source: China’s Human Flesh Search Engine

Ian Lamont writes “Microsoft’s Vice President for Trustworthy Computing Scott Charney, speaking at the RSA conference in San Francisco, has floated an interesting proposal to deal with infected computers: Approach the problem of dealing with malware infections like the healthcare industry, and consider using ‘general taxation’ to pay for inspection and quarantine. Using taxes to deal with online criminal activity is not a new idea, as demonstrated by last year’s Louisiana House vote to levy a monthly surcharge on Internet access to deal with online baddies.”

Source: Microsoft VP Suggests ‘Net Tax To Clean Computers

SeattleGameboy writes “An indictment has been issued for online ticket brokers known as ‘Wiseguy Tickets and Seats of San Francisco.’ From 2002 to 2009, they used bots, server farms, and CAPTCHA hacking to buy vast number of premium tickets (Springsteen, Miley Cyrus, NFL, MLB playoffs, etc.) and made $25 million in profits. ‘They wrote a script that impersonated users trying to access Facebook, and downloaded hundreds of thousands of possible CAPTCHA challenges from reCAPTCHA. They identified the file ID of each CAPTCHA challenge and created a database of CAPTCHA “answers” to correspond to each ID. The bot would then identify the file ID of a challenge at Ticketmaster and feed back the corresponding answer. The bot also mimicked human behavior by occasionally making mistakes in typing the answer, the authorities said.’ I guess you can break any system like CAPTCHA if you want it badly enough.”

Source: Scalpers Earned $25M Gaming Online Ticket Sellers

Many different sources are writing to tell us about Google’s acquisition of online image editing tool Picnik. “And all this leads us to today’s exciting news: we’ve just been acquired by Google! What does this mean for Picnik? It means we can think BIG. Google processes petabytes of data every day, and with their worldwide infrastructure and world-class team, it is truly the best home we could have found. Under the Google roof we’ll reach more people than ever before, impacting more lives and making more photos more awesome. What does this mean for you Picnikers? Nothing is changing right away, but Picnik now has more potential than ever before. The team that built Picnik from the grass up will continue making advanced and powerful photo-editing easier, more intuitive and more fun, so stay tuned to hear about all the cool new stuff we’re working on.”

Source: Google Acquires Online Image Editing Tool Picnik

medea and several other readers noted that the LHC came back online early this morning. Here is the tweet from CERN announcing the milestone. As we discussed a few weeks ago, CERN plans to run the LHC at half power or less through 2011.

Source: The LHC Is Back Online

KentuckyFC writes writes to share a new online test that is being touted as the “financial Turing test.” The web-based exercise asks users to distinguish between real and randomly generated financial data. “Various economists argue that the efficiency of a market ought to be clearly evident in the returns it produces. They say that the more efficient it is, the more random its returns will be and a perfect market should be completely random. That would appear to give the lie to the widespread belief that humans are unable to tell the difference between financial market returns and, say, a sequence of coin tosses. However, there is good evidence that financial markets are not random (although they do not appear to be predictable either). Now a group of scientists have developed a financial Turing test to find out whether humans can distinguish real financial data from the same data randomly rearranged. Anybody can take the test and the results indicate that humans are actually rather good at this kind of pattern recognition.”

Source: Scientists Develop Financial Turing Test

A whistleblowing site is back online Thursday, after Microsoft’s attempt to keep it quiet backfired.

Source: Whistleblower Site Back After Microsoft Withdraws Complaint

An anonymous reader writes “Lawrence Lessig, the foundational voice of the free culture movement, will deliver a talk on fair use, politics, and online video from Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. You’ll be able to tune in to a live webcast. The lecture by Lawrence Lessig will last 45 minutes, and will be followed by a 30 minute interactive Q & A session. The event will be moderated by Elizabeth Stark of the Open Video Alliance. Questions can be submitted using the hashtag #wireside. This is a talk about copyright in a digital age, and the role (and importance) of a doctrine like ‘fair use.’ Fair use allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, and is essential for commentary, criticism, news reporting, remix, research, teaching and scholarship with video. As a medium, online video will be most powerful when it is fluid, like a conversation. Like the rest of the internet, online video must be designed to encourage participation, not just passive consumption. Tune in here on February 25th, 6:00pm US Eastern time (see more time zones), or check out our screening events in cities across the world.”

Source: Wireside Chat With Lawrence Lessig