He who is slient, is strongest.

Welds BigTable to file system 'Colossus'

Exclusive Google Caffeine — the remodeled search infrastructure rolled out across Google's worldwide data center network earlier this year — is not based on MapReduce, the distributed number-crunching platform that famously underpins the company's previous indexing system. As the likes of Yahoo!, Facebook, and Microsoft work to duplicate MapReduce through the open source Hadoop project, Google is moving on.…

Gadgetank writes "Researchers out of the Australian National University have created a device, working in conjunction with other necessary devices, that can literally move small particles with light. And only light. The way it works is by shining a hollow laser beam around some tiny glass particles. The researchers heat the air around the particles, and therefore cause the dark center of the beam to remain cool."

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Weeding the walled garden

Comment Over two years after the debut of the iTunes App Store, Apple has finally provided developers with guidelines describing what apps are and aren't acceptable for inclusion in what Steve Jobs has called Cupertino's "curated platform."…

I'm Not There (1956) writes "Broadcom, the world's largest manufacturer of Wi-Fi transceivers, open sources its Linux device drivers. This is a big win for Linux users, as there are a lot of users that face Wi-Fi problems when they use Linux on their laptops. With these device drivers now open source, distributions can ship them out-of-the-box, and that means no Linux Wi-Fi problems for new devices and upcoming distributions at all."

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An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla has published the first Firefox 4 build that integrates a new JavaScript engine that aims to match the performance in IE9 and reduces the gap to Safari, Opera and Chrome. This is really the big news we have been waiting for all along with Firefox 4 and it appears that the JavaScript performance is pretty dramatic and seems to beat IE9 at least as far as ConceivablyTech shows. Good to see Mozilla back in the game." The Mozilla blog gives a good overview of the improvements this brings; Tom's Hardware also covers the release.

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Synergies Ahoy!

Former Sun Microsystems chief executive Jonathan Schwartz has opted for the hard life of Silicon Valley startup rather than running another Fortune 500 mega corp into the ground.…

Stoobalou writes "The people behind VLC, quite probably the most useful media player available right now, have submitted an iPod version to the Apple software police. VLC — which is rightfully famous for having a go at playing just about any kind of audio or video file you care to throw at it — should appear some time next week, if it makes it through the often unfathomable approval process implemented by Apple. The Open Source Video Lan Client has been tweaked to run on the iPod by software developer Applidium."

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Urge 'principled stand' against Oracle

Open source advocates are asking you to write to Larry Ellison to protest about Oracle's damaging decision to prosecute Google over Java.…

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cgriffin21 writes "T-Mobile Thursday finally confirmed what it's been hinting at for a while: The HTC G2, T-Mobile's HSPA+ successor to the HTC G1, is on the way. It'll be an Android 2.2 phone and run on T-Mobile's HSPA+ data network, which while not a 4G network offers what T-Mobile is calling 4G-like speeds up to 21 Mbps. T-Mobile hasn't confirmed pricing or exact availability but said it would open the G2 to presales for existing customers at the end of September."

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Tootech writes "In a case of 'physician, heal thyself,' the agency — which forms the operational arm of DHS's National Cyber Security Division, or NCSD — failed to keep its own systems up to date with the latest software patches. Auditors working for the DHS inspector general ran a sweep of US-CERT using the vulnerability scanner Nessus and turned up 1,085 instances of 202 high-risk security holes. 'The majority of the high-risk vulnerabilities involved application and operating system and security software patches that had not been deployed on computer systems located in Virginia,' reads the report from assistant inspector general Frank Deffer."

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Rahmmp writes "Adobe has sounded an alarm for a new zero-day flaw in its PDF Reader/Acrobat software, warning that hackers are actively exploiting the vulnerability in-the-wild. An Adobe spokeswoman described the attacks as 'limited' but warned that that could change with the availability of public samples and exploit code."

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wiedzmin writes "This month, officials from the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), armed with fingerprinting machines, iris scanners and cameras hooked to laptops, will fan out across the towns and villages of southern Andhra Pradesh state in the first phase of the project whose aim is to give every Indian a lifelong Unique ID (UID) number for 'anytime, anywhere' biometric authentication. While enrolling with the UIDAI may be voluntary, other agencies and service providers might require a UID number in order to transact business. Usha Ramanathan, a prominent legal expert who is attached to the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in the national capital, said that, 'taken to its logical limit, the UID project will make it impossible, in a couple of years, for an ordinary citizen to undertake a simple task such as traveling within the country without a UID number.' Next step, tying that UID number and biometric information to to their RIM BlackBerry PIN number."

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coondoggie writes "Talk about finding a needle in a cosmic haystack. Scientists this week said they found microscopic shrapnel in a meteorite of a star they say exploded around the birth of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago."

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'If it sounds like we're control freaks, well ...'

Apple has finally published some rules for applications submitted to the iTunes store, and it seems that down in Cupertino they're just as bored of flatulence-themed applications as the rest of us.…

wiredmikey writes "In a recent investigation, it was discovered that cybercriminals are creating 57,000 new 'fake' websites each week looking to imitate and exploit approximately 375 high-profile brands. eBay and Western Union were the most targeted brands, making up 44 percent of exploited brands discovered. Visa, Amazon, Bank of America and PayPal also heavily targeted by cybercriminals. Banks comprise the majority of fake websites by far with 65 percent of the total. Online stores and auction sites came in at 27 percent, with eBay taking the spot as the No. 1 most targeted brand on the Web today."

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Wanna know the price? Come in and sit down, friend ...

With a substantial portion of Dell's server business based on custom and quasi-custom designs that shrink server sizes and offer better performance per watt than the standard PowerEdge machines, the server maker cannot rest on its laurels or play favorites with Intel as it did in days gone by. Sometimes, companies want a machine that leverages processors from Advanced Micro Devices, and Dell must make such a box.…

Don't tell Mel Gibson

The coalition government's wiki-powered loony magnet - Your Freedom website - which aims to collect the internet's very finest ideas - is shutting tomorrow, or rather "entering the next stage".…

FSF has issued a statement about Oracle's patent infringement lawsuit against Google over Android. While Google could have avoided all this by using the GPL'd IcedTea and they have yet to take a stand against software patents, still nothing, FSF writes, can excuse Oracle's patent aggression. "Oracle is wrong to use its patents to attack Android," FSF concludes.

They have a number of suggestions on how they think you can help, including searching for prior art. The result of all this, unless Oracle changes course, will be, FSF points out, that everyone will dump Java: Programmers will justifiably steer clear of Java when they stand to be sued if they use it in some way that Oracle doesn't like. One of the great benefits of free software is that it allows programs to be combined in ways that none of the original developers would've anticipated, to create something new and exciting. Oracle is signaling to the world that they intend to limit everyone's ability to do this with Java, and that's unjustifiable. If you have prior art, you can place it here or on the End Software Patents wiki, as they suggest, or both.

Should it?

One way for Oracle to solve HP's CEO problems is for it to buy HP and re-install Mark Hurd as CEO.…

You type it in here, and it comes out there

Security watchers are concerned that scareware scammers may quickly adapt to the introduction of real-time search technology from Google to develop even more potent search engine poisoning attacks.…

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