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Papas Fritas writes:

Jane Wakefield reports at BBC that a man convicted of possessing child abuse images is among the first to request Google remove links to pages about his conviction after a European court ruled that an individual could force it to remove "irrelevant and outdated" search results. Other takedown requests since the ruling include an ex-politician seeking re-election who has asked to have links to an article about his behaviour in office removed and a doctor who wants negative reviews from patients removed from google search results.

Google itself has not commented on the so-called right-to-be-forgotten ruling since it described the European Court of Justice judgement as being "disappointing". Marc Dautlich, a lawyer at Pinsent Masons, says that search engines might find the new rules hard to implement. "If they get an appreciable volume of requests what are they going to do? Set up an entire industry sifting through the paperwork?" says Dautlich. "I can't say what they will do but if I was them I would say no and tell the individual to contact the Information Commissioner's Office." The court said in its ruling that people could request the removal of data related to them that seem to be "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed."

shortscreen writes:

A man was identified as a potential donor when his wife needed a transplant for her left lung. However, doctors determined that the lobe from the man's left lung would be inadequate. They decided to use a larger lobe from his right lung instead. Swapping the organ from right to left would present a challenge to surgeons, who must connect blood vessels during the procedure. So a 3D model of the woman's chest cavity was produced, and the team planned out their actions in advance.

The surgery took place at Kyoto University in early March. The woman was discharged on May 10th, her husband having already recovered and returned to work.

iwoloschin writes:

Apple's reality distortion field must be faltering. The mobile giant is being sued by a former customer who is claiming that since switching to Android she has had issues receiving text messages from other iPhone users.

Apple's iMessage retains text messages sent from other users of Apple devices and won't deliver them to her Samsung Electronics Co. phone running on Google Inc.'s Android operating system, Adrienne Moore said in the complaint filed yesterday in San Jose, California.

People who replace their Apple devices with non-Apple wireless phones and tablets are "penalized and unable to obtain the full benefits of their wireless-service contracts," according to the complaint.

This is a well known problem, with my wife suffering through the same issue several months ago when switching to a Nexus 5. We eventually had to call Apple up to tell them to manually disable iMessage, though they seemed a little confused as to why you would ever want to do that.

Fluffeh writes:

ArsTechnica has a nice OP-ED about Galloping Ghost, which claims to be the largest Arcade in the USA.

Galloping Ghost, an arcade located in the western suburbs of Chicago, was said to house well over 400 vintage games. The wall behind the front counter is populated by pixel-art characters from popular video games. A small fridge offers up carbonated beverages and sports drinks. Under the counter are candy bars. And as I scanned the dimly lit interior, I saw little more than wall-to-wall consoles resting on well-worn gray carpeting. Stools and chairs are scattered around the aisles in case you want to take a load off while getting your game on. Many of the consoles have placards perched on top with record high scores, both worldwide and for Galloping Ghost.

Getting the arcade open was a challenge on a couple of levels for Mack. First up was finding a location. "We went to other places and other towns," Mack explained. "They said 'you're going to have kids hanging out there.' And there were problems back in the '80s." It's also a big time commitment. Although he has a small handful of staff, he's there almost every day of the week.

gewg_ writes:

Organizers expected up to 30 million folks to participate in Washington D.C. on May 16 for OPERATION AMERICAN SPRING, "the 'Beginning Of Tyranny Housecleaning' when all criminal elitist members of the incumbent government led by that Kenyan usurper will be removed..."

73 individuals actually showed up. Many more folks, noting the massive fail, took to Twitter to offer likely excuses. My favorite: "Put hood on backwards and ran into tree".

Fluffeh writes:

The American Society of Civil Engineers is cracking down on researchers who post their own articles on their personal websites. The publisher, which owns dozens of highly cited journals, claims that the authors commit copyright infringement by sharing their work in public. To make their work easier to access, many researchers host copies of their work on their personal profiles, usually hosted by their university. Interestingly, however, this usually means that they are committing copyright infringement.

While many journals allow this type of limited non-commercial infringement by the authors, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) clearly doesn't. The professional association publishes dozens of journals and during the past few weeks began a crack down on "pirating" researchers.

Thanks go to lhsi who also sent news of this article to us.

warcques writes:

I have loved the /. community for its articles and cynicism since the early 2000's, and now my favorite community is you soylentils. But let's say I want to read these full stories in print. What magazines or journals are out there? I'd like to see something with stories within the scope of SoylentNews or Vice's Motherboard, but with a more critical (as in deep-thinking, not just the pessimism and ideological fighting) exploration of today's issues.

cnst writes:

Bob Beck who is an OpenBSD, OpenSSH, and LibreSSL developer as well as the director of Alberta-based non-profit OpenBSD Foundation gave a talk earlier today at BSDCan 2014 in Ottawa, discussing and illustrating the OpenSSL problems that have led to the creation of a big fork of OpenSSL that is still API-compatible with the original, providing a drop-in replacement, without the #ifdef spaghetti and without its own "OpenSSL C" dialect.

Bob is claiming that the Maryland-incorporated OpenSSL Foundation is nothing but a for-profit front for FIPS consulting gigs, and that noone at OpenSSL is actually interested in maintaining OpenSSL, but merely adding more and more features, with the existing bugs rotting in bug-tracking for a staggering 4 years (CVE-2010-5298 has been independently re-discovered by the OpenBSD team after having been quietly reported in OpenSSL's RT some 4 years prior).

Bob reports that the bug-tracking system abandoned by OpenSSL has actually been very useful to the OpenBSD developers at finding and fixing even more of OpenSSL bugs in downstream LibreSSL, which still remain unfixed in upstream OpenSSL.

It is revealed that a lot of crude cleaning has already been completed, and the process is still ongoing, but some new ciphers already saw their addition to LibreSSL RFC 5639 EC Brainpool, ChaCha20, Poly1305, FRP256v1, and some derivatives based on the above, like ChaCha20-Poly1305 AEAD EVP from Adam Langley's Chromium OpenSSL patchset.

To conclude, Bob warns against portable LibreSSL knockoffs, and asks the community for Funding Commitment -- the Linux Foundation is turning a blind eye to LibreSSL, and instead is only committed to funding OpenSSL directly, despite the apparent lack of security-oriented direction within the OpenSSL project upstream. Funding can be directed to the OpenBSD Foundation.

Appalbarry writes:

From the PLOS Blog: new research suggests that one of the outcomes of Europe's dealing with The Black Death, the pandemic at its height in Europe during the mid-14th century, was increased life expectancies for people living in the years after.

To make long and complicated methodology short, these analyses indicate that post-Black Death Londoners appear to have lived longer than pre-Black Death Londoners. The author estimates that the general population of London enjoyed a period of about 200 years of improved survivorship, based on these results.

The virulent killer, the Black Death, may have helped select for a healthier London by influencing genetic variation, at least in the short term.

And before anyone else brings it up....

Anonymous Coward writes:

Over at MSFN Forums, user 'harkaz' has described a simple 3-step method of applying newer Microsoft updates to Windows XP operating systems.
 
He says: "The constraints are entirely artificial. Porting is easy as 1-2-3 ... So Windows XP can have semi-official support until 2019!"

gishzida writes:

In a Blog post over at The Physics Arxiv Blog , The Kentucky Fried Colonel talks about a new paper submitted to the Arxiv.

From the article:

In the 1930s, the American psychologist Burrhus Skinner popularised the notion of operant conditioning, the notion that an individual's future behaviour is determined by the punishments and rewards he or she has received in the past. It means that specific patterns of behaviour can be induced by punishing unwanted actions while rewarding those that are desired. And it certainly works with rats and pigeons.

"This idea has since become one of the foundations of behavioural psychology and is an important driver of the way online social networks are designed and operate. Many have systems that allow people to like, or up-vote, certain types of content while disliking, or down-voting, others. An up-vote can be thought of as a reward designed to encourage while the down-vote is a punishment designed to discourage.

In theory, this should guide contributors towards producing better content that is more likely to be rewarded. At least, that's what the theory of operant conditioning predicts.

But does that actually happen on real social networks? Today, we find out thanks to the work of Justin Cheng at Stanford University in Palo Alto and a couple of buddies.

These guys have measured how up-voting and down-voting influences the behaviour of a large number of contributors to different social networks. And they say that the results are far from reassuring.

The evidence is that a contributor who is down-voted produces lower quality content in future that is valued even less by others on the network. What's more, people are more likely to down-vote others after they have been down voted themselves. The result is a vicious spiral of increasingly negative behaviour that is exactly the opposite of the intended effect."

Gishzida asks:

Hey folks, what does this say about the power to down mod posts here at our favorite news site? Should we eliminate down modding? Why? or Why not? Show your work...

gewg_ writes:

Cider Compatibility Layer Allows Android to Run iOS Apps

Y'say you're disappointed because every mobile app in the universe doesn't run on your thingie. Cheer up, bunkie. If you run Android, some guys at Colombia U have a tweak for that.

Sadly, the software isn't perfect. The iOS apps don't have access to hardware like GPS, and many run quite slowly. That said, Cider is an impressively broad solution to app cross compatibility. With a bit more development and tweaking, it could very well serve as a viable replacement for an iOS device in a pinch. Or it might languish like the Android for iPhone project.

carguy writes:

Amazon controls a big chunk of the book distribution business but as this New York Times article indicates they are not a benevolent overlord--using a number of techniques to bully publishers for more favorable terms.

Over the years this has been a constant problem for small, specialty publishing houses (the source of many important books), but now it's also affecting the majors.

From the article:

The retailer appeared to be using three main tactics in its efforts against Hachette, which owns Grand Central Publishing, Orbit and Little, Brown as well as many other imprints.

Fluffeh writes:

The 28 House members who lobbied the Federal Communications Commission to drop net neutrality this week have received more than twice the amount in campaign contributions from the broadband sector than the average for all House members. According to research provided Friday by Maplight, the 28 House members received, on average, $26,832 from the "cable & satellite TV production & distribution" sector over a two-year period ending in December. According to the data, that's 2.3 times more than the House average of $11,651.

The US has long applied common carrier status to the telephone network, providing justification for universal service obligations that guarantee affordable phone service to all Americans and other rules that promote competition and consumer choice.

Some consumer advocates say that common carrier status is needed for the FCC to impose strong network neutrality rules that would force ISPs to treat all traffic equally, not degrading competing services or speeding up Web services in exchange for payment. ISPs have argued that common carrier rules would saddle them with too much regulation and would force them to spend less on network upgrades and be less innovative.

pillo writes:

What is the largest lawsuit ever filed?

Did you guess Apple v. Samsung? SCO taking over the world? Not even close!

This is Anton Purisima v. Au Bon Pain Store, Carepoint Health, Hoboken University Medical Center, Kmart Store 7749, St. Luke's Emergency Dept., New York City Transit Authority, City of New York, NYC MTA, LaGuardia Airport Administration, Amy Caggiula, and Does 1-1000. Case No. 1:14 CV 2755 (S.D.N.Y. filed 4/11/2014).

What did the defendants allegedly do? "Civil rights violations, personal injury, discrimination on national origin, retaliation, harassment, fraud, attempted murder, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and conspiracy to defraud. $2,000 decillion ($2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000)", not including punitive damages.

Randall Munroe's What If? analyzed exactly how much money that is, and how it could be repaid (I especially like this answer in the forums). Might just have set the new record for the Biggest Known Demand!

It's the weekend and a slow news day, so here's an opportunity to let your imagination run wild. What suggestions do you have for the plaintiff and/or defendants?