The Little Hacker's Room

Scot Parker signs a new contract with West Ham that will keep him at the club until 2014.

Budget airline Bmibaby has been charging customers to put bags in the hold when they are small enough for the cabin, the BBC learns.

The government of China plans to require that anyone buying a mobile device first register their personal details. China isn't the first: many European and Asian countries already have similar measures in place to prevent anonymous use of cellphones and mobile data devices.

The Free Software Foundation has put out a a href=http://www.fsf.org/news/oracle-v-googlestatement/a about Oracle's lawsuit against Google. Not surprisingly, it finds Oracle's position to be spanunjustifiable/span, but it also comes as no surprise that it isn't completely happy with Google either. spanUnfortunately, Google didn't seem particularly concerned about this problem until after the suit was filed. a href=http://en.swpat.org/wiki/GoogleThe company still has not taken any clear position or action against software patents/a. And they could have avoided all this by building Android on top of a href=http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/java-trap.htmlIcedTea/a, a GPL-covered Java implementation based on Sun's original code, instead of an independent implementation under the Apache License. The GPL is designed to protect everyone's freedommdash;from each individual user up to the largest corporationsmdash;and it could've provided a strong defense against Oracle's attacks. It's sad to see that Google apparently shunned those protections in order to make proprietary software development easier on Android./span

Apple says that it will publish the guidelines it uses to determine which programs it sells in its App Store to appease critical developers.

Twelve US soldiers face charges over a secret "kill team" reported to have blown up and shot Afghan civilians selected at random. The soldiers allegedly collected their victims' fingers as trophies. (thanks, Antinous)

A rare copy of John James Audubon's Birds of America, billed as the world's most expensive book, is to go on sale at Sotheby's.

Animal welfare experts say it could take weeks to free a humpback whale caught up in ropes off Shetland.

A decision to shut a pathology department will lead to a delay in post-mortems and the downgrading of a general hospital, claims a coroner.

wiredmikey writes "In a recent investigation, it was discovered that cybercriminals are creating 57,000 new 'fake' websites each week looking to imitate and exploit approximately 375 high-profile brands. eBay and Western Union were the most targeted brands, making up 44 percent of exploited brands discovered. Visa, Amazon, Bank of America and PayPal also heavily targeted by cybercriminals. Banks comprise the majority of fake websites by far with 65 percent of the total. Online stores and auction sites came in at 27 percent, with eBay taking the spot as the No. 1 most targeted brand on the Web today."pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fyro.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F10%2F09%2F09%2F153222%2FCybercriminals-Create-57000-Fake-Sites-Each-Week" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Cybercriminals+Create+57%2C000+Fake+Sites+Each+Week%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2Fbup3ku" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/09/09/153222/Cybercriminals-Create-57000-Fake-Sites-Each-Week?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./piframe src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?op=discussamp;id=1782106amp;smallembed=1" style="height: 300px; width: 100%; border: none;"/iframeimg width='1' height='1' src='http://slashdot.feedsportal.com/c/32909/f/530758/s/d979202/mf.gif' border='0'/ pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/-TrWIeBXwDgTuESgwuv0PtxZtH4/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/-TrWIeBXwDgTuESgwuv0PtxZtH4/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/-TrWIeBXwDgTuESgwuv0PtxZtH4/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/-TrWIeBXwDgTuESgwuv0PtxZtH4/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/INSKPpOkSRY" height="1" width="1"/

Intel is to launch its first chip with built-in graphics, while established phone chipmaker ARM releases a fast new chip.

Folks who live on Lustful Court in Macon, Georgia are lobbying for their street to be granted a name change. The county commissioners have suggested that the residents submit a petition. Yoshonda Patterson told the Associated Press "she thinks the name gives people the wrong idea about the neighborhood on the east side of Macon."

Also in the news this week, the UK's Bladder Lane and Butt Hole Road. And then there's the classic unfortunate street name used in England in the Middle Ages -- Gropecunt Lane -- "believed to be a reference to the prostitution centered on those areas," according to Wikipedia.

Broadcom - long seen as the last big proprietary holdout in the area of wireless networking - has announced the availability of a fully open driver for its current 802.11n chipsets. spanThe driver, while still a work in progress, is released as full source and uses the native mac80211 stack. It supports multiple current chips (BCM4313, BCM43224, BCM43225) as well as providing a framework for supporting additional chips in the future, including mac80211-aware embedded chips./span It's going into the staging tree initially. (Thanks to Luis Rodriguez).

Industrial areas in the North East and Midlands are least resilient to economic shocks, BBC-commissioned research suggests.

Education Secretary Michael Gove announces a review of vocational education in England, which he says "lost its way" under Labour.

Comedians Victoria Wood and Vic Reeves sign up to star in a feature-length film about the comic duo Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise.

Radio-Canada apprend que les registres des entrées et des sorties au cabinet du premier ministre à Québec, qui sont des éléments de preuve importants dans l'affaire Bellemare, ont failli être détruits durant l'été. Les documents consignant l'accès au bureau de Jean Charest à Montréal n'ont pas été retrouvés.

An anonymous reader writes "Earlier this year Apple caused major upset among developers by updating the iPhone developer program license with clause 3.3.1. It basically stopped the use of cross-platform compilers, meaning Adobe Flash could not be used to develop an app for the App Store. The move also put into doubt which other development platforms could be used and generally caused a lot of confusion. Apple has just significantly relaxed that policy and allowed for the use of development tools, as long as "the resulting apps do not download any code"."pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fapple.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F10%2F09%2F09%2F141254%2FApple-Relaxes-iOS-Development-Tool-Restrictions" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Apple+Relaxes+iOS+Development+Tool+Restrictions%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F9XUXb5" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/09/09/141254/Apple-Relaxes-iOS-Development-Tool-Restrictions?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./piframe src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?op=discussamp;id=1782040amp;smallembed=1" style="height: 300px; width: 100%; border: none;"/iframeimg width='1' height='1' src='http://slashdot.feedsportal.com/c/32909/f/530758/s/d972652/mf.gif' border='0'/ pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/1OWlOrejGlsUqWf1TZoS14rhVfQ/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/1OWlOrejGlsUqWf1TZoS14rhVfQ/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/1OWlOrejGlsUqWf1TZoS14rhVfQ/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/1OWlOrejGlsUqWf1TZoS14rhVfQ/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/bB8zQYtiv98" height="1" width="1"/

An invasive species of predatory shrimp has been found in the UK for the first time.