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After the disastrous technological launch of the healthcare.gov website, built by political cronies rather than companies who understand the internet, there has been plenty of discussion as to why the code wasn't open sourced. At that link, there's a good discussion from On the Media, with Paul Ford, discussing what a big mistake it was that the government decided not to open source the code and be much more transparent about the process. It discusses the usual attacks on open source and why they almost certainly don't apply to this situation.

This is hardly a surprise, but similar to the Joel Tenenbaum case, Jammie Thomas-Rasset (the other person sued for copyright infringement for using a file sharing system), has lost again. The appeals court (8th Circuit) has ruled that $9,250 per song infringed is perfectly reasonable and that the judge in the case, Michael Davis, erred in calling for a new trial after the initial jury verdict (the first of three). There were a number of procedural issues here, and it's worth pointing out that Thomas-Rasset herself more or less asked the court to bring back this first verdict and focus on the Constitutionality of the damages amount. So, the whole mess with the three separate district court trials sort of gets swept under the rug. However, the court simply isn't buying Thomas-Rasset's claim that the statutory damages are unconstitutionally punitive and a violation of due process. Basically, it says that the fact that statutory damages are completely out of whack with actual damages doesn't matter, because the point of statutory damages is that they're disconnected from actual damages on purpose (because, in theory, they're put in place because actual damages are difficult to assess).

takes hold of computers by exploiting CVE-2013-2465, a critical Java vulnerability that Oracle patched in June. The security bug is present on Java 7 u21 and earlier. Once the bot has infected a computer, it copies itself to the autostart directory of its respective platform to ensure it runs whenever the machine is turned on. Compromised computers then report to an Internet relay chat channel that acts as a command and control server.

The botnet is designed to conduct distributed denial-of-service attacks on targets of the attackers' choice. Commands issued in the IRC channel allow the attackers to specify the IP address, port number, intensity, and duration of attacks.

The defendants, aged between 18 and 28, are believed to have stolen more than $100 million in intellectual property and other proprietary data from the likes of Microsoft Corporation, Epic Games, Valve, and even the US Army. This includes pre-release versions of Gears of War 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Apache helicopter simulation software developed for the US army, and information about the Xbox One console. Two of the suspects have pleaded guilty, one of which is 22-year old David Pokora. His plea represents what may be the first conviction of a foreign-based individual for hacking into US businesses to steal trade secret information.

18-count superseding indictment

"We hope to witness two atmospheres colliding," explains David Brain of the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP).  "This is a once in a lifetime event!"

Everyone knows that planets have atmospheres.  Lesser known is that comets do, too.  The atmosphere of a comet, called its "coma," is made of gas and dust that spew out of the sun-warmed nucleus.  The atmosphere of a typical comet is wider than Jupiter.

The timing could scarcely be better.  Just last year, NASA launched a spacecraft named MAVEN to study the upper atmosphere of Mars, and it will be arriving in Sept. 2014 barely a month before the comet. MAVEN is on a mission to solve a longstanding mystery: What happened to the atmosphere of Mars?  Billions of years ago, Mars had a substantial atmosphere that blanketed the planet, keeping Mars warm and sustaining liquid water on its surface. Today, only a wispy shroud of CO2 remains, and the planet below is colder and dryer than any desert on Earth. Theories for this planetary catastrophe center on erosion of the atmosphere by solar wind.

the report recognized that email privacy is critical

one issue was left conspicuously unaddressed in the report. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the civil agency in charge of protecting investors and ensuring orderly markets, has been advocating for a special exception to the warrant requirement. No agency can or should have a get-out-of-jail-free card for bypassing the Fourth Amendment.

the algorithm is only as fair as the data fed into it.

NASA recently announced that the rover has arrived at the base of Mount Sharp, a 3.4-mile-high mountain that Curiosity has been heading towards since July of 2013.

Curiosity was designed to travel a maximum of 660 feet per day and navigate difficult terrain on its six wheels. The Spirit rover traveled only 4.8 miles over its lifespan, although the still-active Opportunity rover has logged about 25 miles since 2003. Curiosity's path was rerouted earlier this year after scientists found that sharp rocks were poking holes in its wheels.

In the recent Octane Fitness case (PDF), the Supreme Court changed the test for fee-shifting precisely to deter behavior such as Lumen's, Cote found. Lumen didn't do "any reasonable pre-suit investigation," and filed a number of near-identical "boilerplate" complaints in a short time frame. That all suggests "Lumen’s instigation of baseless litigation is not isolated to this instance, but is instead part of a predatory strategy aimed at reaping financial advantage from the inability or unwillingness of defendants to engage in litigation against even frivolous patent lawsuits."