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CNET News

Congress acts, sort of saves Internet radio Ars Technica - 46 minutes ago By Nate Anderson | Published: September 30, 2008 - 11:30PM CT It's not all bailout negotiations, partisan recriminations, and White House meetings this week in Congress—our elected officials also found some time to pass the Webcaster Settlement Act of … Webcasting - and Pandora - saved! ZDNet Senate OKs Web Radio Bill, Sends to President PC Magazine CRN - Slashdot - CNET News - BetaNews all 203 news articles

Iddo Genuth writes “Researchers at the Surface Science Laboratory at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid have created an ultrasmooth mirror that could be used to create a revolutionary new atomic microscope within the next several years. The new atomic microscope — using helium atoms for imaging — has the potential to provide the same resolution as existing electron microscopes but without many of the problems which have plagued them for years.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

VentureBeat

StumbleUpon 2.0: Goodbye software toolbar CNET News - 1 hour ago On Tuesday night StumbleUpon is changing the way users interact with the service, ditching the need for a software-based browser toolbar in place of a small frame that loads on top of the Web site you're on. StumbleUpon Set For Resurgence With Web Toolbar, Partner Program TechCrunch StumbleUpon drops the plug-in top and lets the web in VentureBeat All Things D Blogs all 4 news articles

pgn674 writes “While the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 failed to pass in the House of Representatives, two other bills of interest to this community are currently moving through the US lawmaking process. One is the Broadband Data Improvement Act, which Communications Workers of America claims will help us towards bringing high-speed Internet access to all Americans. It will have the FCC increase their granularity in reporting the Internet accessibility of an area in the US, and redefine broadband measurements. It has passed through the House and the Senate, and differences in the passed versions are currently being resolved. The other bill is the Webcaster Settlement Act of 2008. Pandora is excited for this one as it will give them time to negotiate with SoundExchange (i.e. the RIAA) for new, more affordable royalty rates. The bill is currently in the Senate, and is expected to pass with ease.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Studios Sue to Bar a DVD Copying Program New York Times - 3 hours ago By BRAD STONE Six major movie studios sued RealNetworks, the Seattle-based digital media company, on Tuesday over its new $30 software program that allows people to make digital copies of their DVDs. Movie Studios, RealNetworks Sue Each Other In DVD-Copying Dispute InformationWeek MPAA, RealNetworks Sue Each Other Over DVD Copier PC World ZDNet - CRN - TG Daily - The Associated Press all 481 news articles

ABC News

Advocacy groups already nervous about Xohm WiMAX policies BetaNews - 3 hours ago By Tim Conneally, BetaNews Sprint's Xohm WiMAX network barely got its feet on the ground before neutrality advocates began to tear apart the service's acceptable use and network management policy. I'm One Of Sprint's First WiMAX Customers InformationWeek Sprint's WiMax Shines on Price, Not on Coverage PC World CNNMoney.com - Washington Post - Computerworld - Monsters and Critics.com all 407 news articles

bit-tech.net

Synaptics Inc. is the quiet force behind Google phone's touch screen Los Angeles Times - 3 hours ago The G1, which hits the market Oct. 23, could vindicate the firm's two decades of perfecting touch-screen technology. By Michelle Quinn, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer SANTA CLARA, CALIF. What's Motorola's Android … InternetNews.com Motorola confirms Android plans, but won't say how big BetaNews InformationWeek - FierceWireless - Gizmodo - Twice all 104 news articles

Sydney Morning Herald

Fighting the scourge of scareware BBC News - 4 hours ago By Maggie Shiels Microsoft and Washington State's Attorney General filed lawsuits against scam artists who frighten consumers into buying useless software. Microsoft, Washington State Sue Scareware Makers Over Fake Error … Gizmodo Microsoft to Fight Scourge of 'Scareware' PC World Ars Technica - Washington Post - CNET News - DailyTech all 58 news articles

GPS Business News

Broadcom, Skyhook Join for Better Location Data PC World - 4 hours ago Broadcom will enhance its mobile device chipsets and location-based services (LBS) infrastructure through a partnership with Skyhook Wireless, the company that powers the iPhone's location feature using Wi-Fi access points. Broadcom to use Wi-Fi positioning tech in chips CNET News Broadcom Combines GPS and Wi-Fi for Location GigaOm Washington Post - GPS Business News - Electronista - Boston Globe all 24 news articles

gravis777 sends us to BoingBoing for news that the International Olympic Committee has trademarked a line from the Canadian National Anthem and is threatening to sue anyone who uses it. The line in question is “with glowing hearts.” “The committee is so serious about protecting the Olympic brand it managed to get a landmark piece of legislation passed in the House of Commons last year that made using certain phrases related to the Games a violation of law. The list includes the number 2010 and the word ‘winter,’ phrases that normally couldn’t be trademarked because they are so general.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The postapocalyptic remains of Washington DC are no place for elaborate journal-keeping, but we do it anyway.

Shoebot is a pure Python graphics robot: it takes a Python script as input, which describes a drawing process, and outputs a graphic in a common open standard format (SVG, PDF, PostScript, or PNG). It has a simple text editor GUI, and scripts can describe their own GUIs for controlling variables interactively. Being pure Python, it can also be used as a Python module, a plugin for Python-scriptable tools such as Inkscape, and run from the command line. It was directly inspired by DrawBot and Shoes. Thus, “Shoebot.”

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License: GNU General Public License v3

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Changes:
The project has been renamed to “Shoebot” and the version number reset; it’s moving out of the prototype phase and into proper releases. It now features a stable IDE for simple tinkering, and supports GUI variable control in the style of Drawbot and Nodebox. It is accessible via socket connections, allowing for image control through external applications (e.g. Pure Data). it has better documentation and many new example scripts.

MCS MyRoute helps diagnose connectivity problems with detailed
network routing discovery and analysis, providing visibility to
poor-performing networks and devices. It includes a Java applet that
enables remote users to easily test connections from the MyRoute server.
Essential diagnostic tools including traceroute, ping, reverse DNS,
and whois are combined into a single graphical interface that analyzes
Internet connections, reporting quick and essential data points for
finding connectivity problems. An IP location database identifies the
geographical location of IP addresses and Web servers, showing the path
of an Internet connection on a global map. The domain registration and
network provider contact information are reported for each hop of a
network route for quick problem reporting. Remote Agents enable two-way
connection testing and automated testing from remote locations, for
on-demand testing to resolve a customer problem or long-term continuous
testing to build a baseline and monitor connection performance.

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License: Other/Proprietary License with Free Trial

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Changes:
A throttling option to enforce delay between test start times has been added for Remote Agents.

YourKit Java Profiler is a CPU and memory profiler
that makes it easy to solve wide range of CPU- and
memory-related performance problems. It features
automatic leak detection, powerful tools for the
analysis of memory distribution, an object heap
browser, comprehensive memory tests as part of
your JUnit testing process, extremely low
profiling overhead, transparent deobfuscation
support, and integration with Eclipse, JBuilder,
IntelliJ IDEA, NetBeans, and JDeveloper IDEs.

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License: Free for non-commercial use

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Changes:
A possible crash when huge strings are being rendered is fixed. A problem with Eclipse 3.4 integration is fixed. The 64-bit JVM is automatically used on Windows 64-bit platforms.

libQTidy is a library and some helper programs
that make it easier for developer to integrate
Tidy in Qt applications.

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License: GNU General Public License v2

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Changes:
A KDE 4 kioexec crash with deprecated xdg flags has been fixed. The preloader only set document content when a request finished; this has been fixed. Server response messages are prepared in a separate signal. There is a save current document dialog, and inspector preview with (QWebkit). An invalid text codec may have been used; now the content-type is fetched from a given document. The desktop entry opens a URL, not a single file.

AKVIS Coloriage is a plug-in for colorizing B&W
photos and replacing colors in color photos. It
works equally well for coloring of portraits,
landscapes, fashion,and still life. The skin, sky,
verdure, and tree color patterns help users to
select realistic colors for their picture.

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License: Shareware

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Changes:
This release adds a new Recolor Brush tool. It adds support for EXIF and IPTC data. It has improved compatibility with Vista SP1 and Mac OS X Leopard.

Jspresso is a full-stack Java framework to develop
N-tier distributed desktop-like applications. It
extensively covers the whole software architecture
and relieves the developer from all the plumbing
by solving most of the technical concerns. Its
philosophy extends the “Convention over
configuration” paradigm with a descriptive
strategy made of assembling built-in descriptors
(Java beans). You describe what you want to
achieve and not how you want to achieve it.

GNU ddrescue is a data recovery tool. It copies
data from one file or block device (hard disc,
cdrom, etc) to another, trying hard to rescue data
in case of read errors. GNU ddrescue does not
truncate the output file if not asked to. So,
every time you run it on the same output file, it
tries to fill in the gaps. The basic operation of
GNU ddrescue is fully automatic. That is, you
don’t have to wait for an error, stop the program,
read the log, run it in reverse mode, etc. If you
use the logfile feature of GNU ddrescue, the data
is rescued very efficiently (only the needed blocks are read). Also you can interrupt the rescue at any time and resume it later at the same point.

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License: GNU General Public License v3

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Changes:
Verbosity control of user messages has been simplified.

Social Networks Visualiser (SocNetV) imports and exports various network
file formats (pajek, sociomatrix, dot) and displays the network on
screen. It can create random networks (lattice, same degree, etc.). The
user can visually modify an existing network or draw a new one using the
mouse. Network and actor properties, such as distances, centralities,
diameter, etc., can easily be computed.

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License: GNU General Public License v3

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Changes:
Erdos-Renyi random network creation. A new layout method: node sizes according to their indegrees. No node limit. You can load any network you want. loadPajek() recognizes Arcslists and Matrix edges formats. Edges are only drawn once (faster loading and node movement). A new LCD widget displays network density, and there are some improvements to the dock. In-file declared node colors and shapes are used as they should be. Progress Bars (F10) appear when creating random nets over 300 nodes. This release has a new, modern logo (it still resembles a snail, though.)

SquidClamAv is a dedicated ClamAV antivirus
redirector for Squid. It can run antivirus checks
based on filename regex, content-type regex, and
more. It is easy to install and works even with
heavy Squid access.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This release makes changes to the documentation to reflect testing against Squid 2.7 and 3.0.

Spensierato is a simple-to-use Web site CMS.
It is designed to allow in-site editing so that
non-technical users can just find the page, update
an element, and save it. It is written in PHP using a MySQL backend and released under the GPL. Some components use different license agreements; details are included.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This release has an installer; just delete the spensierato-setup.inc file to allow the installer to run. It includes code cleanup, performance tweaks, new elements, and enhanced login.

Groogle is a Web-based peer code review tool
providing Subversion integration (working with
live repositories), syntax highlighting for a wide
variety of languages, file and repository level
diffing, and email notifications. It is a Web 2.0
LAMP application.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This release fixes issues with displaying duplicate comments in place of other comments.

The “Schily” Tool Box is a set of tools written or
managed by Jörg Schilling. It includes programs
like: cdrecord, cdda2wav, readcd, mkisofs, smake,
bsh, btcflash, calc, calltree, change, compare,
count, devdump, hdump, isodebug, isodump, isoinfo,
isovfy, label, mt, p, sccs, scgcheck, scpio, sdd,
sfind, sformat, smake, sh, star, star_sym, suntar,
gnutar, tartest, termcap, and ved.

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License: Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL)

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Changes:
The SCCS man pages have been updated. sccslog now prints correct timestamps. The cdrtools version is now 2.01.01a50.

ExactImage is a fast C++ image processing library.
Unlike ImageMagick, it allows operation in several
color spaces and bit depths natively, resulting in
much lower memory and computational requirements.
Some optimized algorithms operate in 1/20 of the
time ImageMagick requires, and displaying large
images can be as fast as 1/10 of the time the
“display” program takes.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
Hocr2pdf was improved to allow the extraction of the plain text while parsing the HOCR input. Compilation without any image codec installed on the system was fixed, and a Mac OS X linker bug worked around.

FoodBrowser helps compute the sum of calories
derived from various
foods.

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License: Other/Proprietary License

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Changes:
A calorie estimation window has been added. It is now possible to edit foods within the history window. A number of bugs have been fixed, including one causing dates to disappear from the history window.

Rsyslog is an enhanced multi-threaded syslogd. Among others, it offers support for on-demand disk buffering, reliable syslog over TCP, SSL, TLS, and RELP, writing to databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and many more), email alerting, fully configurable output formats (including high-precision timestamps), the ability to filter on any part of the syslog message, on-the-wire message compression, and the ability to convert text files to syslog. It is a drop-in replacement for stock syslogd and able to work with the same configuration file syntax.

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License: GNU General Public License v3

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Changes:
This release contains new features, improvements, and bugfixes. Most importantly, a bug has been fixed that could cause a segfault on HUP when using the UDP input. Performance has been greatly enhanced. Multi-threaded handling has been improved. This is a recommended update for all development branch users.

Talend Open Profiler (TOP) helps you to profile
your data. TOP’s ergonomic interface allows you to
define metrics (indicators) and collect statistics
on your data in a few clicks. It comes with a set
of regular expressions that helps you to identify
bad data. You can create your own regular
expressions and use them in data profiling
analyses. A lot of options exist for each
indicator, which change the behavior of the
indicator so that it gives you more pertinent
information. Data quality options on indicators
alert you when your data quality is not what you
expected.

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License: GNU General Public License v2

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Changes:
Support has been added for DB2, SQL Server, Oracle with service name, and PostgreSQL. There is a new kind of analysis on a connection. Results of profiling are available with data and graphics, not just with graphics. Data quality alerts have been added. You can import your regular expressions. There are many new ergonomic features. Some bugs have been fixed.

Deliantra is a client for Deliantra game servers. It offers an intuitive user interface for exploring the vast game world, a persistent minimap, powerful macros and keymaps, dialog-based NPC interaction, and easy configuration for the skill, spell, and item system. It is based on Perl, SDL, and OpenGL for high performance on modern systems, and works on both Unix and Windows. Ports to other platforms should be very easy and are underway.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
A race condition has been fixed that could lead to client freezes or crashes on login, especially on slower systems. The smooth movement is no longer choppy. The default font for messages is now a (hopefully nicer looking) proportional font. Text display has been tweaked. The client no longer makes unnecessary screen refreshes, and uses less CPU time.

ExactScan is a versatile document capture
application for home offices and workgroups. It is
designed from the ground up for high-speed
document scanners and can easily handle hundreds
of images per minute, including duplex scans.
Included functionality reaches from managing,
sorting, and editing singles pages to writing
multi- as well as single-page PDF files including
JPEG compression and TIFF, JPEG, JPEG2000, and PNG
bitmap files. ExacScan allows performing state of
the art image processing including automatic
cropping, deskewing, dynamic thresholding for
perfect black and white documents, and descreening
print rasters.

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License: Other/Proprietary License

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Changes:
Support for TWAIN was added to allow using scanners that already come with a Mac OS X TWAIN driver. A new direct scan to printer functionality was added to transform a Mac into a digital copier. Additional controls for the Blank Page Detection were added, as well as the ability to reset profiles to their default settings. Support for new scanners was added; this release supports over 160 document scanners from various brands.

Vuurmuur is a firewall manager for Linux that supports traffic shaping. It has powerful monitoring features for logging and live connections. It can be managed entirely through an Ncurses GUI, on the console, or through SSH.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
Installing of translations was fixed. GUI fixes were made. Better error checking for traffic shaping was implemented. The Dutch translation was updated.