New submitter Ajay Anand writes with news that Eolas's web patents are really dead (the infamous browser plugin patent that forced Internet Explorer to change how it activated plugins). After suing a number of companies, last fall a jury found the patents invalid; Eolas naturally mounted an appeal. But a panel of judges simply affirmed the jury decision (PDF). A quiet ending to a decade of patent trolling.

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Sydsudans president Salva Kiir har sparkat sin regering och vice presidenten, en potentiell utmanare till Kiir.

New submitter Jah-Wren Ryel writes "It's been just over a month since the NSA's dragnet surveillance program was leaked to the public. Tomorrow, Congress is voting on an amendment that would block funding for NSA programs that collect the call records of innocent Americans. A win tomorrow may start a chain reaction — but it won't happen unless we speak up. We have one day to convince Congress to act." The EFF is urging U.S. citizens to call their representatives, noting that there is no time for email to be effective (find your representative). You can read the amendment on the EFF site, quoting the EFF: "Reps. Justin Amash, John Conyers, Jr., Thomas Massie, Mick Mulvaney, and Jared Polis are proposing an amendment that would curtail funding for the implementation of orders under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act unless the order is explicitly limited in scope. ... Even as the Amash/Conyers Amendment is gaining momentum, some are rallying around a decoy amendment that would do nothing to rein in domestic surveillance. That amendment, championed by Rep. Nugent, would not alter in any way the government's use of Section 215 to obtain bulk communications records on millions of Americans. EFF is urging Representatives to oppose the Nugent Amendment."

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New submitter rogue_archivist writes "I'm an archivist at a mid-sized university archives, trying to develop a policy for archiving computer files ('born-digital records' in archival parlance). Currently old floppy disks, CDs, and the occasional hard drive are added to our network storage. Then the physical media is separated from archival paper documents and placed into storage. My question for all you slashdotters out there is: should these disks be imaged and then the physical copies discarded? Is there any benefit for keeping around physical copies of storage media long since rendered obsolete?"

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Japan has said it is taking steps to prevent contaminated water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant leaking into the sea.

”Färre ord än tidigare generationer”.

En älg förirrade sig i kväll in i centrala Göteborg.

garymortimer writes with more news about the rise of our robotic overlords. DARPA is now investigating military drone submarines as launch platforms for UAVs. From the press release: "The Hydra program will develop and demonstrate an unmanned undersea system with a new kind of unmanned-vehicle delivery system that inserts UAVs and UUVs stealthily into operational environments to respond quickly to situations around the world without putting U.S. military personnel at risk. The Hydra large UUV is to use modular payloads inside a standardized enclosure to deploy a mix of UAVs and UUVs, depending on the military situation. Hydra will integrate existing and emerging technologies in new ways to create an alternate means of delivering a variety of payloads close to where they're needed, DARPA officials say."

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Imagine a short (audio) squawk, less than one second long, as a secure authentication method for cell phones or other mobile devices. A company called illiri has developed (and has a patent pending on) a method to do exactly that. The company is so new that its website has only been up for a month, and this interview is their first real public announcement of what they're up to. They envision data sent as sound as a way to facilitate social media, mobile payments (initially with Bitcoin), gaming, and secure logins. Couldn't it also be used for "rebel" communications, possibly by a group of insurgents who want to overthrow the Iranian theocracy? Or even by dissidents in Russia, the country our interviewee, illiri co-founder Vadim Sokolovsky, escaped from? (And yes, "escaped" is his word.) And, considering the way illiri hopes to profit from their work, should they think about open sourcing their work and making their money with services based on their software, along with selling private servers that run it, much the way Sourcefire does in its industry niche? Their APIs are already open, so moving entirely to open source is not a great mental leap for illiri's management. In any case: Is their idea worthwhile? Are there already ways to achieve the same results? Is illliri's way enough better than existing mobile device security systems that it's worth exploring? And would it be better, not just for the world in general, but as a way to help illiri's founders make a living if their software was open source? (Transcript included)

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Via Ars comes news that the OpenGL 4.4 and OpenCL 2.0 were released yesterday. OpenGL 4.4 features a few new extensions, perhaps most importantly a few to ease porting applications from Direct3D. New bindless shaders have access to the entire virtual address space of the card, and new sparse textures allow streaming tiles of textures too large for the graphics card memory. Finally, the ARB has announced the first set of conformance tests since OpenGL 2.0, so going forward anything calling itself OpenGL must pass certification. The OpenCL 2.0 spec is still provisional, but now features a memory model that is a subset of C11, allowing sharing of complex data between the host and GPU and avoiding the overhead of copying data to and from the GPU (which can often make using OpenCL a losing proposition). There is also a new spec for an intermediate language: "'SPIR' stands for Standard Portable Intermediate Representation and is a portable non-source representation for OpenCL 1.2 device programs. It enables application developers to avoid shipping kernel source and to manage the proliferation of devices and drivers from multiple vendors. OpenCL SPIR will enable consumption of code from third party compiler front-ends for alternative languages, such as C++, and is based on LLVM 3.2. Khronos has contributed open source patches for Clang 3.2 to enable SPIR code generation." For full details see Khronos's OpenGL 4.4 announcement, and their OpenCL 2.0 announcement. Update: 07/23 20:17 GMT by U L : edxwelch notes that Anandtech published notes and slides from the SIGGRAPH announcement.

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