From Droid Life: Electronic Frontier Foundation Petitioning To Keep Rooting And Jailbreaking Phones and Tablets Legal

In 2010 the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was passed to help stem the ever present problem of copyrighting media in the digital age. The Electronic Frontier Foundation worked hard though to get a few exemptions to this bill, namely protecting remix videos from being taken down and phones being jailbroken; or rooted. Now, these exemptions are up for renewal this year and not only is the EFF asking for help renewing the two exemptions they have now, they want to expand the exemptions to cover rooting tablets and jailbreaking video game consoles as well.

This is quite a big deal, because if these exemptions do not get renewed it would technically be illegal to root your phone allowing any company who wishes to come after you in court. The biggest case of this would be Sony taking legal action against George Hotz, a man who figured out how to jailbreak the Playstation 3 and put it on the internet. The EFF has a full page dedicated to the rooting exemptions needed along with a petition to sign and a place to send comments directly to the U.S. Copyright Office. There are somewhere near 5,000 signatures already, let’s add our names to make sure we can keep hacking our phones as much as we want.

Via:  EFF Website | Petition

from Droid Life

From Engadget: Quantum dots could increase fiber optic bandwidth up to 10 times

Quantum dots could increase fiber optic bandwidth up to 10 times (video)

Nothing screams World of Tomorrow quite like quantum dots. Alongside the possibility of paint-on solar cells, the technology could also multiply optic fiber bandwidth by up to ten times. The Photonic Network Research Institute at NICT has been able to crank up the capacity of the data transmission system by combining a light source and photonic crystal fiber. The quantum dots act as the light source, and via the NICT’s new “sandwiched sub-nano separator structure” [above], they can be tweaked to work at 70THz — far in excess of the 10THz frequencies typically used. Aside from optical communications, the potency of these high frequencies allow it to pass beyond skin, opening up the use of quantum dots to medical scanning and high resolution cell imaging. Is there anything these dots can’t do? Catch a slightly more technical explanation in the video right after the break.

 

from Engadget

From Coolest Gadgets: Command & Conquer coded in HTML5

There are moments in life when we look at a particular object and think, “Now why didn’t I think of this before?” I am quite sure that many of us who spent our teenage years in the mid-1990s would have played the game Command & Conquer at some point in time or another, where the almighty tank could be stopped by something as simple as sandbags, and had hours and hours of fun honing our RTS skills in front of the computer. Well, a hardcore coder decided that playing the game today on a legacy system is just too mainstream, and coded the entire Command & Conquer in HTML5, where the entire thing runs on 69k of Javascript.

Aditya Ravi Shankar built the clone as part of his attempt to improve his coding skills, where he gave himself an entire month to do so, building the game in the browser while going through the original game’s files in order to get sprites, sounds and specs just the way it was. According to Shankar, “In hindsight, I might have wanted to take smaller steps and make a tower defense game instead of jumping directly into an RTS. Trying to do the whole thing in under a month all by myself wasn’t the smartest idea.”

Still, he got the job done, and there were some glitches here and there during testing, such as tanks getting stuck in the sea, and it works best in Chrome or Firefox. If you want to help improve Shankar’s work, check out the source code here.

Source


from Coolest Gadgets