xTantrum writes with an AP story that begins "A robotic suit that reads brain signals and helps people with mobility problems will be available to rent in Japan for $2,200 a month starting Friday — an invention that may have far-reaching benefits for the disabled and elderly."

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diegocgteleline.es writes "Linux 2.6.27 has been released. It adds a new filesystem (UBIFS) for 'pure' flash-based storage, the page-cache is now lockless, much improved Direct I/O scalability and performance, delayed allocation support for ext4, multiqueue networking, data integrity support in the block layer, a function tracer, a mmio tracer, sysprof support, improved webcam support, support for the Intel wifi 5000 series and RTL8187B network cards, a new ath9k driver for the Atheros AR5008 and AR9001 chipsets, more new drivers, and many other improvements and fixes. Full list of changes can be found here."

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coondoggie contributes this snippet from NetworkWorld: "You could probably see this one coming. With all of the confusion and money involved you knew there would be cyber-vultures out there looking to cash in. Well the Federal Trade Commission today issued a warning that indeed such increased phishing activities are taking place. Specifically the FTC said it was urging user caution regarding e-mails that look as if they come from a financial institution that recently acquired a consumer's bank, savings and loan, or mortgage. In many case such emails are only looking to obtain personal information — account numbers, passwords, Social Security numbers — to run up bills or commit other crimes in a consumer's name, the FTC stated."

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dizzymslizzy writes "With prompting from the Sunlight Foundation's Open House Project, the US Library of Congress announced today that its online database THOMAS will now generate persistent URLs, known as legislative handles, for legislation documents. As Free Government Info says, 'it is certainly nice to be able to link to legislation with a persistent link! But it would be much better if one could click to create a link rather than following a 600-word description of how to link on another page.' Still, this is a definite step forward for the Library of Congress and for government transparency. From THOMAS: 'Legislative Handles are a new persistent URL service for creating links to legislative documents from the THOMAS web site (http://thomas.loc.gov). With a simple syntax, Legislative Handles make it easy to type in legislative links to bibliographies, reference guides, emails, blogs, or web pages. Legislative Handles, for instance, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.uscongress/legislation.110hconres196, are a convenient way to cite legislation.'

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caffeinemessiah writes "The New York Times has an interesting story on a new algorithm by researchers from Tel Aviv University that modifies a facial picture of a person to conform to standards of attractiveness. Based on a digital library of pictures of people who have been judged 'attractive,' the algorithm finds the nearest match and modifies an input picture so it conforms to the 'attractive' person's proportions. The trick, however, is that the resultant pictures are still recognizable as the original person. Here's a quick link to a representative picture of the process. Note that this is a machine-learning approach to picture modification, not a characterization of beauty, and could just as easily be used to make a person less attractive." Note: As reader Trent Waddington points out, the underlying research was mentioned in an earlier story as well.

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A bit later than expected, Linus has released the final 2.6.27 kernel. For those just tuning in, 2.6.27 includes (among many other things) UBIFS, support for integrity checking in the block layer, multiqueue networking, the ftrace tracing framework, the lockless page cache, the relocation of a lot of firmware, the GSPCA webcam driver set, and a number of extended system calls. See the always-excellent KernelNewbies summary for lots more information about this release.

ma11achy was one of several readers to write about claims made by two former military intercept operators who worked for the NSA that "Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home." Ars Technica has a brief report as well, and reader net_shaman adds a link to Glenn Greenwald's opinion piece on the eavesdropping at Salon.

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An anonymous reader writes "As discussed previously on Slashdot, concern has been raised over a class of 'clickjacking' vulnerabilities which affect all major Web browsers. These exploits allow an attacker to place invisible or seemingly legit objects on a Web page that perform undesired actions when a user clicks on them. In recent developments, 'Guya' posted a scary proof-of-concept that hijacks Adobe Flash Player to spy on users with a webcam and/or microphone. In response, Adobe released an advisory with a temporary workaround, and stated that a future Player update will address the exploit. This prompted the original disclosers of the vulnerabilities to post a summary of the exploits. Additionally, Giorgio Maone, creator of the popular NoScript extension for Firefox and other Gecko-based browsers, released version 1.8.2.1 of NoScript, which adds 'ClearClick,' a feature that intercepts clicks made on invisible or otherwise obscured elements on a page. Although issues remain, there seems to be progress in addressing these security problems."

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Kev92486 writes "I was scanning through my RSS feeds today and happened upon an article about Google's GeoEye-1 imaging satellite which launched on Sept 6. Intrigued as to what the quality of the image was like, I decided to check it out only to find that the first picture was actually of my college campus, Kutztown University (Pennsylvania). I had to make sure I was reading the article correctly as Kutztown is not a very large or well known campus. I'm not sure as to why they chose Kutztown for their first pictures. I would be interested if anybody could provide some sort of insight as to what process was used to select the first test location. Was the satellite simply in a convenient orbit to snap pictures of Kutztown?" Update: 10/09 20:56 GMT by T : HotHardware has its own article up on GeoEye-1, if you'd like your words and pictures in the same place.

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casualsax3 writes "I'm going to be taking a week long round trip from NYC to Puerto Vallarta Mexico sometime next month, and I was planning on taking my laptop with me. I'll probably want to rip a few movies and albums to the drive in order to keep busy on the flight. More important though, is that I'm also going to be taking pictures while I'm there, and storing them on the laptop. With everything in the news, I'm concerned that I'll have to show someone around the internals of my laptop coming back into the US. The pictures are potentially what upsets me the most, as I feel it's an incredible violation of my privacy. Do I actually need to worry about this? If so, should I go about hiding everything? I've heard good things about Truecrypt. Is it worth looking into or am I being overly paranoid?"

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Madas writes "This article on Absolute Gadget details how researchers at Boston University's College of Engineering are working on devloping wireless networks that use LED lights instead of normal radio waves. This research apparently has other uses in the automobile industry. Apparently the LEDs could warn you if the driver in front has put the brakes on so could avoid hitting the car in front. Personally, I'd use the vision balls that are in my thought box."

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Nom du Keyboard writes "For years the figures of $200 billion and 750,000 jobs lost to intellectual property piracy have been bandied about, usually as a cudgel to demand ever more overbearing copyright laws with the intent of diminishing of both Fair Use and the Public Domain. Now ARS Technica takes a look into origin and validity these figures and finds far less than the proponents of them might wish."

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BT (the incumbent telephone company in the United Kingdom) are in the process of spending millions of pounds on upgrading their network to an all-IP core. However, they have failed to consider 21st Century protocol support, preferring to insist that IPv4 is enough for everyone. Haven't they noticed the IPv4 exhaustion report yet?

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netbuzz writes "Comic creator Randall Monroe suggested in a recent xkcd strip that YouTube comments would be better — or, more precisely, less idiotic — if only those posting them were forced to hear their words read aloud first. Well, YouTube has gone and made this "audio preview" a reality, albeit an optional one. And, it's not the first time that xkcd has contributed to the betterment of the Internet, as those who are familiar with last year's "Internet census" and its use of a Hilbert curve may remember."

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MojoKid writes "Current regulation, introduced with the Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive (RoHS) in July of 2006, primarily sought to prevent the unnecessary use of toxic metals in batteries as well as making it easier to recycle and dispose of used batteries. The updated 'New Batteries Directive,' as discussed in New Electronics by Gary Nevision, would go much further. Article 11 of the directive, as currently written, would require that devices must be made in such a way as to allow batteries, either for replacement or at end of life for disposal to be 'readily removed.' Of course, Apple's iPhones and iPods wouldn't meet this requirement, as it stands. It's obvious that an iPhone battery replacement program could be considered a cash cow for Apple as well."

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musther writes "An Australian airline Qantas Airbus A330-300, suffered 'a sudden change of altitude' on Tuesday. "The mid-air incident resulted in injuries to 74 people, with 51 of them treated by three hospitals in Perth for fractures, lacerations and suspected spinal injuries when the flight bound from Singapore to Perth had a dramatic drop in altitude that hurled passengers around the cabin." Now it seems Qantas is seeking to blame interference from passenger electronics, and it's not the first time; 'In July, a passenger clicking on a wireless mouse mid-flight was blamed for causing a Qantas jet to be thrown off course.' Is there any precedent for wireless electronics interfering with aircraft systems? Interfering with navigation instruments is one thing, but causing changes in the 'elevator control system' — I would be quite worried if I thought the aircraft could be flown with a bluetooth mouse."

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The Register reflects on the history of Linux. "Linux is what Windows had once promised to be - at least in terms of cross-platform support. In the wake of the PowerPC alliance from IBM, Apple, and Motorola in 1991, Microsoft made a commitment to support Windows NT 3.51 on PowerPC chips. Windows eventually added support for Digital's Alpha NEC's and SGI's MIPS chips. Workstation maker Intergraph ported Windows NT 3.51 to its Clipper chips and said it was creating a port to Sparc chips from Sun. Neither ports saw the light of day."

DesktopLinux.com features an interview with Miguel de Icaza. "GNOME project co-founder Miguel de Icaza discusses the release of Mono 2.0, in this detailed interview with Henry Kingman, executive editor of DesktopLinux. The conversation spans Mono's history, current state, and future, with stops along the way for updates on Moonlight and Mono Develop."

Debian has updated mon (insecure temp files) and iceweasel (multiple vulnerabilities).

Mandriva has announced the release of Mandriva Linux 2009. "Mandriva Linux 2009 goes further in its innovations and offers a thoroughly modern and cutting-edge graphical environment: KDE 4.1. Personalizable, modular, scalable, and full of visual effects that enhance the environment, KDE's new version is usable everywhere, from the oldest hardware to the newest. Mandriva’s team has gone to great lengths to integrate this new environment in a way that ensures everyone can jump right in to using it, with a customized graphical theme, careful choice of the most powerful applications, and a default configuration tuned to your system's particular hardware."