An anonymous reader writes “Writer and activist Cory Doctorow says competition keeps Google behaving ethically because it believes there are benefits to be had. However, as it moves into sectors where it faces fewer rivals this may not always be the case. ‘It actually seems to be a quality metric. They believe they can attract…

Apple announced a couple new iPhones this week, Microsoft rolled out Xbox Music for iOS and Android, and new phones are starting to arrive in our hands…….

Artist Janet Cardiff’s spellbinding sound installation, “The Forty Part Motet,” uses a room full of Bowers & Wilkins speakers…….

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Bill Gates was his hero and role model. And, indeed, Facebook has become as ubiquitous as once was true of Windows. But why isn’t there an Apple-style competitor?……

wabrandsma writes “James Logan’s patent company, Personal Audio, has closed a licensing agreement with SanDisk. The company says that now ‘between a third and two thirds of all mp3 audio players’ are made by companies to which its patents have been licensed, including LG, Samsung, HTC, Motorola, Blackberry and Amazon. The Electronic Frontier Foundation wants…

vinces99 writes in with news about a new cookstove design for developing countries. “About 3 billion people, or 42 percent of the world’s population, rely on burning materials such as wood, animal dung or coal in stoves for cooking and heating their homes. Often these stoves are crudely designed, and poor ventilation and damp wood…

angry tapir writes “In a new twist on strange brew, an Intel engineer has showed off a project using wine to power a microprocessor. The engineer poured red wine into a glass containing circuitry on two metal boards during a keynote by Genevieve Bell, Intel fellow, at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. Once…

Billionaire American engineer and inventor Ray Dolby died this week at age 80. The wide-scale adaption of his technology changed the way almost everyone listens to music and movies…….

theodp writes “Made possible by a $30 million grant from the Dept. of Education’s Race to the Top program, the NY Times reports that every student and teacher in 18 of Guilford County’s (NC) middle schools is receiving a tablet created and sold by Amplify, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. The tablets —…

Debian Linux Security Advisory 2757-1 – Several vulnerabilities were identified in WordPress, a web blogging tool. As the CVEs were allocated from releases announcements and specific fixes are usually not identified, it has been decided to upgrade the WordPress package to the latest upstream version instead of backporting the patches…….