Facebook launched a new set of APIs on Monday that allow third-party software to interact with the Facebook activity stream. Developers can use these new APIs to build sophisticated Facebook client applications that give users direct access to the stream from their desktop.

Courtesy of these APIs, rich support for Facebook could soon arrive in your favorite Twitter client and other social networking programs. In this article, I’ll give you an inside look at how I used the new APIs to add full support for the Facebook stream in Gwibber, my own open source microblogging client for Linux.

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Earlier this week, the EFF published a new report detailing the FBI’s Investigative Data Warehouse, which appears to be something like a combination of Google and a university’s slightly out-of-date custom card catalog with a front-end written for Windows 2000 that uses cartoon icons that some work-study student made in Microsoft Paint. I guess I’m supposed to fear the IDW as an invasion of privacy, and indeed I do, but given the report’s description of it and my experiences with the internal-facing software products of large, sprawling, unaccountable bureaucracies, I mostly just fear for our collective safety.

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The wide world of Disney entertainment can now be seen on the smallest of laptop screens: Disney is coming to Hulu.

According to Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, the news is especially good for Hulu because “we are honored to be working with a company that quite frankly inspired us from the very start of Hulu. Walt Disney was a founder, an innovator, a person with an atypically high quality bar, and someone who was maniacal in his obsession to delight his customers.” (Also, in his obsession to root out commies in the unions.)

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Every three years, the US Copyright Office reviews the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s most controversial section—the ban on circumventing DRM, even for legal uses. The Copyright Office has the authority to issue three-year exemptions to that blanket ban, carving out space for DVD-ripping film school profs, for instance, or making it legal for people to bypass DRM in order to unlock cell phones.

Tomorrow, four days of hearings begin on a new round of exemptions (read the schedule). What’s on the table? Jailbreaking your iPhone, busting the DRM on music and movies if authentication servers ever die, ripping clips from DVDs for noncommercial use, breaking digital locks on DRM schemes that “compromise the security of personal computers,” and cracking open DRM on subscription streaming video “where the provider has only made available players for a limited number of platforms,” among others.

Advocates of new exemptions are aiming high here, especially when you consider how stingy the Copyright Office has been in handing out such exemptions over the years. We spoke to three such advocates who will be testifying before the Copyright Office over the next few weeks, often while sitting right next to lawyers from Apple Computer, the DVD Copy Control Association, Time Warner, the MPAA, and others who oppose them. Given the odds against them, how are they preparing for the hearings—and do they hold out any chance of success?

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The US’ ability to engage in cyberwarfare is quickly outstripping its ability to determine when it’s appropriate to do so. That’s the conclusion of a report by the National Academies of Science, which evaluated the nation’s cyberwarfare capacity. The report suggests that, although international law provides some rough guidelines about when it may be appropriate to loose the virtual weaponry, offensive computer weapons have properties that make them distinct from those of traditional warfare, and the US hasn’t engaged in any sort of national debate or set a coherent policy that would regulate their use.

The report was prepared by two groups within the NAS: the Committee on Offensive Information Warfare and the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. Both are populated largely from the academic world, but also include retired military officers and people in the private sector, such as employees of Google, Microsoft, and Sun. Funding for their evaluation was provided by the National Research Council (a branch of the NAS), Microsoft, and the MacArthur foundation.

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Back in March, President Obama announced a change in policy that would allow government-funded researchers to use federal money to pursue research on embryonic stem cells. In the same speech, he set forth a list of principles that would guide science decision-making during his administration. Now, the National Institutes of Health and the Office of Science and Technology Policy are seeking input from the public as they attempt to implement these rules. But the administration is not standing still, as Obama used a speech to the National Academies of Science to announce additional science initiatives.

Stem cell policy

First, the stem cell policy. Researchers will still be unable to use federal money to derive new human embryonic stem cells, as a Congressional ban called the Dickey-Wicker Amendment prohibits that. Still, federal money will eventually flow to those who are working with any cell lines that adhere to the draft guidelines. These guidelines focus on the process of deriving cell lines from embryos created for IVF, but not implanted. The gist seems to be that the NIH wants to ensure that the donors of any such embryos are fully aware of alternative options, and are choosing to provide them for research in the absence of any inducement or duress.

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If you’re one of those people who believes that US commercial radio sucks, a new study from the Future of Music Coalition (FMC) provides some empirical support as to just how it sucks. Despite vowing to change its ways, big radio programmers are amazingly conservative; much of the music they play comes from major labels, and it tends to be older (and well-known) material. Not even government consent decrees have been able to change that.

With the major labels currently pushing hard to make radio stations pay (more) to play music, it’s easy to forget that only two years ago, the two groups were caught up in a big payola scandal—that is, the labels were paying the stations to push particular songs. After New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and the FCC both shut down the practice, the radio stations agreed to all sorts of things, including $12.5 million in fines and a “set-aside” of 4,200 programming hours for independent artists.

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As a night owl myself, I look at those who are bright and chipper early
in the morning and think “why?” To me, being awake and functioning
before 10am is fairly difficult to comprehend. Even looking back on
my life, I have no idea how I managed to wake up, clean up, and drive
the 30 minutes into the city each day for four years in high school.
Yet others will look at me with puzzlement when I state my usual
bedtime—many of my Nobel Intent contributions have come from
after midnight.

A new study, carried out by a team of Belgian and Swiss researchers
and published in last week’s issue of Science, looked at the underlying cause of what makes one an early bird or
a night owl, and what effects this has on day-to-day life. The
study consisted of 31 participants, 16 morning people, and 15 night
owls—the night owls’ days were shifted an average of four hours
later
than those of the early birds. Each participant was instructed to go about
their lives, sticking to their bedtime/wake routines for a week
before they spent two days in a sleep lab. Once under the more controlled
conditions of the lab, researchers examined the participants’ brains
using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while the subjects
attempted a psychomotor vigilance task—a simple reaction time
test.

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Four individuals were indicted by a federal grand jury in Missouri this week for spamming more than 2,000 colleges and universities across the US. The team first started on their scheme at the University of Missouri and then branched out, hitting up nearly every college and university in the country. As a result, the spammers and their company were all charged in a 51-count indictment that includes fraud in connection with computers, fraud in connection with e-mail, conspiracy, and violations of the CAN-SPAM Act.

According to the acting US Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, Matt J. Whitworth, two brothers and two of their best spamming friends sold more than $4.1 million worth of products to college students. The brothers, Osmaan Ahmad Shah and Amir Ahmad Shah, allegedly developed “e-mail extracting programs” to harvest over 8 million student e-mail addresses.

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In the United States, Patapon 2 has been news mostly due to the game’s unique digital-only delivery method—in other regions the game comes on a UMD, in a case, just like every other game. We’ll explore how downloading the title works, but we’re also going to talk about the game itself, as it has gotten somewhat short shrift in our coverage so far. No matter how the game gets to you, there is a wonderful strategy title here.

Last week Sony sent us a review code for the game, which was entered into the PlayStation Store to unlock the 361MB download. After that, the game launched off the Pro Duo card like any other PSN game on the PSP, complete with a digital manual. If you delete the game to save space, you can download it again. When you buy the game on May 5 at retail stores it will come with a code inside a UMD case, or you can download the game directly from the PlayStation Network on May 7. Both versions will cost $19.99.

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The Eucalyptus project, which aims to provide open source infrastructure for cloud computing, is growing beyond its university roots and is heading straight for enterprise data centers. The key developers behind the project have launched a company with the intent of commercializing the technology, and have received $5.5 million in venture capital funding to get them started.

Eucalyptus can be used to build elastic computing environments—like Amazon EC2—on top of conventional clusters. It provides infrastructure for automating virtual machine provisioning and management so that a cluster’s computational resources can be made accessible to users in a more flexible way. It leverages the open source Xen hypervisor and it is designed to run on the Linux platform. Its management APIs are modeled after those provided by EC2, which means that it is largely compatible with tools that are built to work with Amazon’s service.

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A new report from Nielsen Online suggests that Twitter hasn’t yet reached a level of growth that can sustain the service, according to the research firm’s mathematical model. Despite the explosive popularity of the messaging service, Nielsen data indicates more than 60 percent of Twitter users that visit the site in a given month do not return the following month.

“Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent,” writes David Martin, vice president of Primary Research for Nielsen Online, in a company blog entry. “For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.”

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Pure Digital Technologies is keeping up the pace with the constant updates to its pocket-sized camcorder line. The company introduced a new model today, the Flip Ultra HD, which brings the Ultra line up to the same HD standards that the Mino line saw last November. Like the Flip Mino HD, the Ultra HD shoots 720p footage and—in many ways—mirrors the Mino HD’s feature set. So what exactly is different about these two camcorders?

We think it’s best to describe the Ultra HD as a minor improvement upon the Mino HD experience. While the Mino HD has 4GB of internal, nonexpandable memory (providing 60 minutes of 720p HD footage at 30 fps), the UltraHD has twice that much—8GB of space, allowing for 120 minutes of full-resolution footage. The Ultra HD also has a larger screen than the Mino HD—a 2-inch display versus 1.5-inch on the Mino HD—and the same level of 2x digital zoom. But that’s just the beginning.

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Cloaking devices and metamaterials are hot topics in the realm of science where optics blurs into materials science. By crafting materials that can interact with specific wavelengths of light, researchers have been able to steer that light around small objects, essentially cloaking the object at those wavelengths. The problem so far is that many of these materials are very specific about the wavelengths they work at, and none of those were in the visible spectrum. Now, researchers have designed a cloaking material that operates across a range of the near-infrared, and suggest it should be possible to bring things down to the visible spectrum.

The material was used in a test setup that’s similar to one that was used in past work in the microwave range. The setup can basically be described as a mirror with a bump. When light hits it directly, the bump acts a bit like a funhouse mirror, distorting the reflection. The cloaking device can be put down on top of the bump and steer light waves in a way that makes it look as if neither the bump nor the cloak were there, producing reflections as if there were a smooth, undistorted mirror in place.

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The current flu outbreak may have passed a major milestone today and, in addition, it claimed its first victim on US soil. The milestone is that reports of suspected cases have now gone nationwide, even though the number of confirmed cases within the US remains very small, suggesting that the general population is now interpreting any symptoms that vaguely resemble the flu as indicative of a serious issue. In contrast, the death, though unfortunate, tells us little about the risks posed by the current outbreak.

The death was announced by the Centers for Disease Control this morning. The child was just shy of two years old, an age that’s frequently endangered by other strains of the flu. The illness may have actually originated in Mexico, as the child only recently traveled to the US with its family. The death occurred on Monday in Texas, where the child had been hospitalized; testing later confirmed the presence of the current swine flu strain.

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We are inching closer to a resolution to the European Commission’s latest antitrust complaint against Microsoft. The software giant has submitted its response to the Commission’s current inquiry into whether the bundling of Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system violates antitrust laws.

The European Union’s probe was launched in January 2008 in response to allegations by Norwegian browser maker Opera that IE’s bundling with Windows hurt competition in the browser space. Beyond browser tie-in, the EU is also looking into IE standards compliance as well as a complaint by the European Committee for Interoperable Systems over Office 2007 and the .NET Framework.

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The French government resurrected its “Création et Internet” three-strikes bill today after suffering a stunning defeat some weeks back, and it doesn’t mean to make the same procedural mistakes twice. The bill must go through another round of parliamentary debate, but it looks set to pass sometime in May. In the meantime, however, the European Parliament plans to pass a major telecom overhaul that just might make the French approach to online copyright infringement illegal. And, as if the pure political situation weren’t crazy enough, the grassroots groups opposing the graduated response law plan to stage May Day marches in protest.

“Création et Internet” has been talked about for years, and was supposed to pass last month. Taking passage for granted, most deputies left the lower chamber during the vote. At the last moment, though, 15 Socialists swarmed in from the hallway, voted against the bill, and defeated it 21-15—a shockingly small number of votes for such a crucial piece of legislation.

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The Internets have been rife with speculation about the possibility of a new entry into the Sony PlayStation Portable line, with the biggest noise surrounding a rumored new system that doesn’t feature the battery-draining UMD drive of the past PSP models. While many industry insiders have been talking about the hypothetical system—the buzz at GDC was deafening—the crew at 1UP are now claiming that it’s real, it has been confirmed to them, and it’s likely to be called the PSP Go!

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Those behind the open source Internet video player Miro have launched a new adoption system! No, you won’t be adopting babies or kittens, or even polar bears in Antarctica—instead, users can “adopt” a line of source code from Miro for $4 in order to help support the continued development of the software.

Miro (originally Democracy Player) was relaunched by the Participatory Culture Foundation (PCF) in 2007. PCF is a nonprofit organization that functions via donations in order to pay programmers to develop the software for Mac, Windows, Ubuntu, and other Linux distros. PCF recently released Miro 2.0 with some UI improvements, support for more Web-based video sources, and direct download improvements.

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The Pirate Bay trial saw the defendants trot out “the Google defense” on multiple occasions: Google indexes .torrent files, so what’s wrong with our doing it? That point didn’t sway the judge, who saw a world of difference between what the two sites did, but it did resonate with at least one Internet coder, who last week rolled out The Pirate Google.

The site serves as little more than a gateway to a Google custom search (it simply limits all queries to .torrent files, something that any searcher can do on their own by adding “filetype:torrent” to searches). It exists not so much to provide useful functionality, but to make the same point that The Pirate Bay admins made at their trial: Google indexes all of this stuff as well.

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You can’t stop piracy, but you may be able to convince the pirates to pay for your game. When indie game developer ACE Team found its Zeno Clash in the expected places online, it decided to take a deep breath and engage the people downloading the game. The response? In many cases, second thoughts about stealing the title.

“Zeno Clash is an independently funded game by a very small and sacrificed group of people. The only way in which we can continue making games like this (or a sequel) is to have good sales,” Carlos Bordeu wrote in the comments for the torrent. “I am aware that at this moment there is still no demo of the game, but we are working on one which will be available soon.

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Quantum computing is the hot topic in atomic physics and optics at the moment. It has gotten to the point where some journals appear to be willing to publish anything that can combine a logic gate and a quantum state, no matter how far fetched the piece might be. Needless to say, I was kind of skeptical when pointed to yet another Nature publication on quantum memory systems.

The paper presents a scheme that preserves quantum states for much longer than the current six millisecond record, allowing them to be stored for up to half a second. Although there are hidden disadvantages to the scheme, it represents an important breakthrough in the field, because the storage time is now longer than the time it takes to perform an individual logic operation.

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Choice appears to be the hallmark of this edition of the System Guide. Both the Budget Box and Hot Rod have excellent choices from Intel and AMD available in the CPU and motherboard selection, running the gamut from low- to high-end. Combine this with continued jumps in video card performance from both NVIDIA and AMD, and we end up with lots of choice in both the Budget Box and Hot Rod.

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Choice appears to be the hallmark of this edition of the System Guide. Both the Budget Box and Hot Rod have excellent choices from Intel and AMD available in the CPU and motherboard selection, running the gamut from low- to high-end. Combine this with continued jumps in video card performance from both NVIDIA and AMD, and we end up with lots of choice in both the Budget Box and Hot Rod.

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Late last year, Google announced that it had reached a settlement with several major publishers that would end their copyright lawsuit against the Google Books service. The settlement would put in place an agreement between Google and existing copyright holders, and give the search giant rights to out-of-print and orphaned works—those for which the copyright holder cannot be identified. Despite the complexity of the settlement, it was on a fast track to approval, with a final thumbs-up scheduled for May. Now, it looks like a delay in the decision is inevitable as opposition to it seems to be rising and the Department of Justice looking into the antitrust implications of the deal.

A portion of the objections come from within the publishing community itself, where a small collection of authors and copyright holders have requested four more months to evaluate the proposed settlement before deciding whether to sign on to it. Google countered with an offer of a two-month delay. The judge ultimately approved a four-month extension.

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The Open Invention Network (OIN), a consortium of companies that have banded together to defend the Linux platform from patent litigation, announced on Tuesday that it has launched an effort to find prior art for Microsoft’s FAT patents.

The OIN’s new FAT-busting project is a response to a lawsuit that Microsoft settled earlier this year with navigation device maker TomTom. The lawsuit claimed that TomTom’s Linux-based products infringe on a number of Microsoft’s patents, including several that describe technical attributes of Microsoft’s FAT filesystem. TomTom initially fought back by filing a countersuit of its own and by joining the OIN, but eventually agreed to pay a licensing fee and remove the features from its implementation.

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One of the longest-running battles in the recording industry’s war against file-sharing appears to have finally come to an end. Michelle (age 22) and Robert (age 18) Santangelo have settled a lawsuit filed against them by the RIAA in November 2006 for P2P use that occurred when Michelle was 15 and Robert 11. The siblings will pay the RIAA a total of $7,000 in installments due by November of this year—a paltry sum given that the RIAA started its settlement offers in the $3,000-4,000 range and often raised the cost if the defendant contested the charges in court.

The RIAA had originally sued their mother, Patricia, in February 2005. Having no knowledge of how to download music, she denied the allegations and soon found herself preparing for trial—despite the fact that the judge presiding over the case called her “an Internet-illiterate parent, who does not know Kazaa from kazoo, and who can barely retrieve her e-mail.” Like the thousands of others who were targeted by the RIAA, she could have made the problem go away with a check for $4,000. Instead, she spent over $24,000 defending herself against the charges before running out of money and firing her lawyer (a fundraising campaign raised an additional $15,000 for her defense).

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Cablevision, a cable ISP based in the New York area, claims to have taken the residential US Internet speed record by rolling out 101Mbps service across the New York area in the next two weeks. Just to sweeten the deal, Cablevision has priced the service at $99.95 per month—and won’t use explicit data caps.

Since other high-speed providers like Comcast and Verizon currently offer a maximum of 50Mbps speeds (and both charge about $140 for it, though Verizon offers a cheaper deal in Virginia and New York), the Cablevision rollout sounds like a great deal. It also shows the power of competition; while much of the country has zero or one 50Mbps option, New York will now have two.

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The Supreme Court ruled today on its first indecency case in 30 years. In a 5-4 decision (PDF), the justices supported the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) sanctions against Fox for a pair of live Billboard Music Award broadcasts containing some, err, “colorful metaphors.” The ruling supports the FCC’s ability not only to ban floods of offensive words, but also to sanction broadcasters for “fleeting expletives” uttered at live events.

What fleeting expletives were involved in this case? The court itself is too squeamish to actually use the words upon which it is ruling hinges (Justice Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion, refers to them as the “S-Word” and the “F-Word”), but neither Cher nor Nicole Richie showed the same sensitivity during their respective time at the mic in 2002 and 2003.

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As we said in yesterday’s column, viral pandemics don’t operate according to news cycles, and this one has shown very little respect for the international dateline, anyway. It has been confirmed that individuals carrying the virus have made it as far as Israel and New Zealand now, so the World Health Organization has raised its pandemic alert level based on these confirmed cases. So far, however, it appears the vast majority of cases outside Mexico are instances where the individual traveled to Mexico and picked it up there. Within Mexico, the death total has now risen to 152, but many of those are suspected cases and there are no indications that anyone outside of that country has died as a result of the virus.

So, that quick rundown out of the way, it’s time for the obvious caveat: all of those numbers may be out of date by the time you read this. So, we’ll focus more on the choice of threat level made by the WHO and provide a bit more background on the flu virus itself.

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GE has announced a breakthrough in holographic storage, which the company believes will bring it much closer to the day when it can store up to 500GB on a single optical disc. Like other efforts that we’ve covered here on Ars over the years, GE has been working for some time on an optical storage medium that uses holograms to store data in three dimensions; this is in contrast to conventional optical discs, which use layers of pitted metal to encode 2D data patterns that can be read by bouncing a laser off of them.

GE’s scientists had reached a point where they were able to use the same types of low-wattage lasers found in conventional DVD and Blu-ray players to read and write holographic data patterns in clear plastic discs, but these holograms didn’t reflect enough light to be easily read. The most recent breakthrough came with the use of a new material that’s reflective enough to make the holograms readable. Because these holograms reflect laser light much better, the patterns can be scaled down in size to enable storage densities on the order of 500GB.

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Thanks to music trade group IFPI, the recent Pirate Bay ruling has now been “Englished” (PDF). While the verdict itself is well-known, numerous case details will be surprising to non-Swedish speakers—such as who paid for The Pirate Bay defense, which defendant was also arraigned on drug charges, and what happened to all that Pirate Bay computer equipment confiscated by the police?

A masterpiece of prose, the verdict is not. “A number of different filesharing programs and technologies have been developed over the years,” says one representative section. “There have been or are two main types of filesharing systems.”

But it does offer plenty of fascinating detail that was difficult for those not at the trial to learn. Let’s take a look.

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Another Swedish ISP has decided not to retain customer IP records in an attempt to protect user anonymity. Tele2 announced this week that it plans to start deleting all IP records after they had been used internally—a move that is still legal under Swedish law, but is beginning to irk law enforcement.

Tele2 is the second major ISP to announce such a plan this month. The first was Bahnhof, which said earlier this month that it refused to keep any log files to hand over to authorities. Both ISPs are reacting to IPRED, the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive. The Swedish incarnation of this European directive went into effect on April 1, and it allows courts to force ISPs to turn over user data in cases of suspected copyright infringement. Because of this loss of anonymity, Internet traffic in Sweden saw an immediate drop.

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As attention is focused on the impending mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, one of NASA’s other orbiting observatories gave us a great reminder that visible astronomy isn’t the only game in town (where “town” equals “near earth orbit”). One of NASA’s other great success stories, the Swift observatory (we’ve mentioned it in so many stories, I’ll just link to a Google search for it) has recently spotted an unusual gamma-ray burst, caused by a supernova, that didn’t appear to arise from an object that could be detected at visible wavelengths. Follow-up observations have now confirmed that this is the most distant event of the sort ever imaged, having occurred over 13 billion years ago.

The Swift was designed to solve a long-standing problem for astronomy. Given something as big as the universe, high-energy events are happening all the time, but we could only observe them if we happened to have an instrument pointing in the right direction at the time. The Swift was designed to detect the direction of high-energy photons, and could swing its instruments to pinpoint the source rapidly. At that point, it could continue observations at gamma-ray and X-ray wavelengths on its own, while the location was relayed to telescopes that could obtain data at other wavelengths. It’s worked exactly as intended, which is why the Swift graces the science news so often.

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Many improvements in electronic miniaturization and efficiency can be tied to the development of capacitor technology, and minimizing the dielectric layer thickness has been the primary driver for improving capacitors. But dielectric layers are approaching the nanometer size, at which point they lose their ability to store charge. In last Sunday’s Nature Materials, a team from University of California Santa Barbera and Rutgers University provided a physical basis for the loss of performance in thin-film capacitors and suggested methods that could greatly improve the energy storage capacity in next-generation devices.

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The mystery Apple chip plot thickens today with the news that the company has poached the CTO of AMD’s Graphics Products Group, Bob Drebin. The million dollar question is, what will Drebin do for Apple as Senior Director?

When Apple bought low-power processor maker PA Semi just over a year ago, it sparked a ton of speculation that the company would get into designing its own chips, most likely for its iPhone and iPod lines. I speculated that Apple would probably get into designing custom, ARM-based system-on-chip (SoC) parts for its handhelds, and then later in the year we got even more evidence that this is what Cupertino had in mind with the purchase.

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Apple is preparing to launch not one, but two new devices with Verizon, according to yet another new rumor. Two “people familiar with the matter” speaking to BusinessWeek have leaked details about an alleged “iPhone lite” and a tablet-like device, one of which may launch as early as this summer (we assume to coincide with the release of iPhone OS 3.0).

These claims seem to support evidence of multiple new devices discovered in the latest iPhone OS 3.0 beta last month. At that time, we dug up product identifiers for yet-to-be-released iPod touch and iPhone models, plus two mystery products referred to as “iProd” and “iFPGA” respectively. iFPGA didn’t conform to Apple’s standard numbering scheme for the iPhone and iPod touch, and iProd had a product number of 0,1, indicating that it could be a prototype under development.

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GNU Screen is a powerful terminal multiplexer that makes it easy for users to manage multiple sessions at the command line. It provides rudimentary window management capabilities in text-based environments and enables users to detach a session and resume it later. The tool has long held a position of distinction among the most popular terminal utilities for system administrators.

Although Screen is very powerful, it is also difficult to configure. Most users aren’t even aware of its more advanced features and few take advantage of its full potential. In an effort to make Screen more accessible to the masses, the Ubuntu developers have assembled a nice collection of embellishments that make the program easier to configure and use. These improvements are delivered in the screen-profiles package, which was introduced in Ubuntu 9.04.

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Swine flu, bird flu, H1N1—tracking the influenza virus can be a confusing task, not generally made easier by the fact that most people only attempt to do so when addled by flu symptoms or in the midst of worries about a potential pandemic. We recognize that the latter appears to apply to the current situation, but we’ll do our part to try to explain a bit of the biology of the virus. Putting together this explanation was made a bit challenging by the fact that anyone we could find who has detailed knowledge of the influenza virus appears to be busy actually working on the current outbreak.

On the surface: the HxNx nomenclature

Like most viruses, the currently spreading swine flu virus has a coat formed of proteins which surround the genetic material that allows the virus to hijack a cell and reproduce. These coat proteins are critical in a variety of ways: they determine which cells the virus can latch onto and infect and, being exposed, they’re the things that antibodies recognize when your body generates an immune response to the virus. For the flu virus, the major coat proteins are called hemagglutinin and neuraminidase—the H and N of the commonly used nomenclature for identifying these viruses.

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The government of India has signed an agreement with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project and will purchase 250,000 of the organization’s XO laptops. The machines will be distributed to students throughout the country. India’s decision to embrace OLPC is a bit unexpected in light of the country’s past antagonism towards the project.

OLPC is a nonprofit organization that builds low-cost education laptops to sell in bulk to governments of developing countries. The project, first unveiled in 2005, has faced many challenges and has been forced to significantly cut staff and reduce the scope of its vision. Despite these setbacks, the program is still marching on and continuing to sell units as it works on an updated model and an innovative next-generation version.

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Facebook has launched an API for its activity stream, making it possible for third parties to create software and services that allow users to directly interact with their streams without visiting Facebook. The Facebook Open Stream API will not only allow client applications to display a user’s stream, it will also allow them to filter, mix, and even post comments to various feed items.

For those of you who aren’t addicted to Facebook, the activity stream is the Twitter-like list of feed items that displays on your Facebook home page, made up of updates from all of your Facebook friends. Things that they are doing, groups they have joined, relationships they have entered or left, events they are attending, photos they have posted, and more are all part of this stream that will be incorporated into the Open Stream API.

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The operator of a public wiki site has filed a lawsuit against Apple in an attempt to defend its rights to publish information under the First Amendment. OdioWorks LLC, which runs BluWiki, filed the lawsuit in a US District Court in the northern district of California today with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in order to seek a declaratory judgment that would protect the company from continued attacks by Apple’s legal team.

BluWiki, like most wiki platforms, is open to the public for the sole purposes of sharing information. The site is noncommercial and doesn’t run ads, and depends on its users to edit and publish articles on a wide variety of topics. Up until about six months ago, some of those topics included information on how to use an iPod or iPhone with third-party software—something that is not possible under Apple’s normal product restrictions.

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The head of the Federal Trade Commission, Jon Leibowitz, has just made clear that the online behavioral advertising business is “pretty close to its last clear chance to demonstrate” the wonders of self-regulation. If companies don’t do a better job with privacy and transparency, the government will (finally) step in and regulate the sector.

The remarks came at the Reuters Global Financial Regulation Summit in Washington, DC, this morning, but they’re not surprising. In recent months, Leibowitz has made it clear that the heavy hand of government is about to lay its vengeance upon behavioral advertisers unless they clean up their collective act.

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In the US, DSL has been falling behind cable and fiber Internet links for some time and now lopes along slowly at the back of the speed pack. But two of the country’s biggest DSL providers, Verizon and AT&T, have found that their efforts to move beyond simple DSL offerings are now generating excellent growth, even in the midst of a recession.

Verizon today announced its financial numbers for the first quarter of 2009, and the results were excellent for its fiber-optic FiOS system. The company’s expensive fiber-to-the-home network added 298,000 new Internet customers, excellent growth considering that FiOS has only 2.8 million Internet customers in total. FiOS now has 55.5 percent more subscribers than it did a year ago, and it currently serves more than 9 million US homes.

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The popular Germany-based file hosting service RapidShare has allegedly begun handing over user information to record labels looking to pursue illegal file-sharers. The labels appear to be making use of paragraph 101 of German copyright law, which allows content owners to seek a court order to force ISPs to identify users behind specific IP addresses. Though RapidShare does not make IP information public, the company appears to have given the information to at least one label, which took it to an ISP to have the user identified.

The issue came to light after a user claimed that his house was raided by law enforcement thanks to RapidShare, as reported by German-language news outlet Gulli (hat tip). This user had uploaded a copy of Metallica’s new album “Death Magnetic” to his RapidShare account a day before its worldwide release, causing Metallica’s label to work itself into a tizzy and request the user’s personal details (if there’s anything record labels hate, it’s leaks of prerelease albums). It then supposedly asked RapidShare for the user’s IP address, and then asked Deutsche Telekom to identify the user behind the IP before sending law enforcement his way.

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Digital cinema systems have been around for some time, even the high-end “4K” variant. Digital cinema upstart RED, however, is making the high-resolution format more accessible for both filmmakers and theaters. And its technological breakthroughs could trickle down to consumers in the not-too-distant future.

At the beginning of this decade, it became apparent that the resolution specifications for HDTV—even the pixel-dense 1080p mode—just weren’t adequate to digitally project feature films in movie theaters. Both the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers as well as a new group, Digital Cinema Initiatives, began work to define standards for digital cinema playback. DCI, formed by several large Hollywood studios, released version 1.0 of the “Digital Cinema System Specification” in 2005; the current 1.2 version of the spec was formalized last March.

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The European Parliament late last week agreed to extend musical copyrights from their current 50-year term to 70 years. So all that early rock ‘n roll about to pass into the public domain? Don’t count on using it in your documentary for another two decades—and there’s nothing to say that the term won’t be extended again.

While the vote is a big victory for the music labels who can continue to market major artists like The Beatles (let’s face it, the obscure stuff from the 1950s isn’t selling in measurable quantities anymore, and it’s not playing on the radio), the movie industry looks set to cash in soon, too. In passing the term extension, Parliament also asked the European Commission to “to launch an impact assessment of the situation in the European audiovisual sector by January 2010, with a view to deciding whether a similar copyright extension would benefit the audiovisual world.”

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Google Code, the search giant’s hosting service for open source software projects, is finally getting support for a distributed version control system. Google has announced that it will be supporting Mercurial alongside its existing support for Subversion.

Distributed version control systems (DVCS) are becoming increasingly popular in the open source software community. Many large projects have already adopted a DVCS and many more are preparing to migrate. The GNOME and Perl communities have adopted Git, MySQL and Ubuntu use Bazaar, and Mozilla and Python use Mercurial.

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Working out can be its own reward, but sometimes we need a little motivation to keep going. That’s where the FiTrainer comes in. The product bills itself as your own electronic trainer, helping you to keep your heart rate exactly where it needs to be to get the maximum effect from your workouts. Plus, it has an incredibly annoying name.

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As Congress once again considers a response to the latest outbreak of “inadvertent” peer-to-peer file sharing, the P2P software industry will doubtless point to its efforts to bring the problem under control. But the latest survey on the state of enterprise computing security, just released by a Silicon Valley area firewall company, isn’t likely to contribute to a general sense of well-being around this issue.

“The allure of high-speed connectivity, the desire to use whatever application they want and the melding of personal and work life means that there is a strong likelihood that many of the applications leveraging increased speeds” in enterprise land “are not business-related,” the report suggests.

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