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An anonymous reader writes "At a hearing today before the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI director Robert Mueller confirmed the agency is using unmanned drones for surveillance within the U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley asked, 'Does the FBI own or currently use drones and for what purpose?' Mueller replied, 'Yes, for surveillance.' Grassley then asked, 'Does the FBI use drones for surveillance on U.S. soil?' Mueller said, 'Yes, in a very, very minimal way, and seldom.' With regard to restricting the use of drones to protect citizens' privacy, Mueller said, 'It is still in nascent stages but it is worthy of debate and legislation down the road.' According to article, 'Dianne Feinstein, who is also chair of the Senate intelligence committee, said the issue of drones worried her far more than telephone and internet surveillance, which she believes are subject to sufficient legal oversight.'"

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A new model bridges the gap between the cold, empty universe after inflation and the dense, hot soup that gave rise to all matter    

Candy Crush Saga developer King recently announced it's ending in-app advertising. What's the real reason? Should you? Freemium designer Benjamin Sipe ponders the issue. ...

GDC Next organizers have announced the first talks for its inaugural event this November - revealing future-leaning talks from Google, Disney, thatgamecompany, plus Adam Orth on 'mob rules'. ...

Virtual reality is rising from the dead thanks to a start-up with global ambitions and crowdfunded technology to back them. Pleased to meet you, Oculus Rift    

Iwata accepts blame for console's struggles, dismisses possibility of a price cut

First time accepted submitter dougkfresh writes "Checkmarx's research lab identified that more than 20% of the 50 most popular WordPress plugins are vulnerable to common Web attacks, such as SQL Injection. Furthermore, a concentrated research into e-commerce plugins revealed that 7 out of the 10 most popular e-commerce plugins contain vulnerabilities. This is the first time that such a comprehensive survey was prepared to test the state of security of the leading plugins." It does seem that Wordpress continues to be a particularly perilous piece of software to run. When popularity and unsafe languages collide.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First time accepted submitter dougkfresh writes "Checkmarx's research lab identified that more than 20% of the 50 most popular WordPress plugins are vulnerable to common Web attacks, such as SQL Injection. Furthermore, a concentrated research into e-commerce plugins revealed that 7 out of the 10 most popular e-commerce plugins contain vulnerabilities. This is the first time that such a comprehensive survey was prepared to test the state of security of the leading plugins." It does seem that Wordpress continues to be a particularly perilous piece of software to run. When popularity and unsafe languages collide.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to an in-depth Vanity Fair article chronicling the departure of Jason West and Vince Zampella from Activision and the lawsuit that followed, the duo who helped make Call of Duty a household name were not getting along at their new studio Respawn Entertainment. Last month West left the company to deal with "family issues," but those issues may have had more to do with his work family than his home life.

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All the latest on newscientist.com: nature that isn't real still heals, Google's Project Loon, tumours' Achilles' heel, and more    

One man's sacrifice has revealed how his cancer mutated from its emergence to its last lethal change, opening the door to a Darwinian approach to therapy (full text available to subscribers)    

Heavy "gloop" that allows mole rats to slip through tight spaces may also protect them from cancer    

What if you couldn't see your enemies at all? Getting players to comprehend this was more complex than Brian Schmidt anticipated, and he writes about developing his game Ear Monsters here. ...

An anonymous reader writes "With the focus from Ubuntu on phones, seven carriers have signed onto their Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group including Deutsche Telekom, Everything Everywhere, Telecom Italia, Korea Telecom, LG UPlus, Portugal Telecom, and SK Telecom. The group is designed for the carriers to let 'mobile operators shape Ubuntu's mobile strategy. Members receive advance confidential briefings and provide us with industry insight to ensure that Ubuntu meets their needs.'" Looks like Ubuntu Phone is getting serious. Mark Shuttleworth writes about their first meeting: "We mapped out our approach to the key question I’ve been asked by every carrier we’ve met so far: how can we accommodate differentiation, without fragmenting the platform for developers? We described the range of diversity we think we can support initially, received some initial feedback from carriers participating immediately, and I’m looking forward to the distilled feedback we’ll get on the topic in the next call. CAG members get a period of exclusivity in their markets."

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After some back and forth from lawmakers in Rhode Island, officials say that they will honor the debt generated from a default on the loan to Curt Schilling's 38 Studios. The state of Rhode Island said that it will officially honor the bonds that financed Kingdoms of Amalur developer 38 Studios after the Rhode Island Finance Committee approved a budget last night that includes an interest payment of $2.5 million, Reuters reports.

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alphadogg writes "Start-up Cumulus Networks this week has emerged with a Linux network operating system designed for programmable data centers like the ones Google and Facebook are building. The company's Cumulus Linux OS operating system includes IPv4 and IPv6 routing, plus data center and network orchestration hooks. Much like OpenFlow for independent, software-defined control of network forwarding, Cumulus Linux is intended to run on commodity network hardware and bring Open Source extensibility to high capacity data centers. The head of the company used to work for Cisco and Google." The distribution is based on Debian and ported to several router platforms. They claim to release most of their code Open Source, but there are at least a few proprietary bits for interfacing to the routing hardware itself.

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Hansoft delivers agile, planning and collaboration tools to a majority of game studios, of all sizes, from around the world. Many of us cut our teeth in creating groundbreaking and highly technology-driving software, and our mission is to deliver the best tools back to the industry we came from.

An anonymous reader writes "As reported earlier on Slashdot it appeared the license covering the MySQL man pages was changed from the GPL to something less good. However, as speculated, this appears to be a bug." The build system was grabbing the wrong files, oops. The fix should be coming shortly: "Once the fixes have been made to the build system, we will rebuild the latest 5.1, 5.5, 5.6 releases plus the latest 5.7 milestone and make those available publicly asap."

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judgecorp writes "BT chief Ian Livingston is leaving the British telecom provider to become a government minister. The executive has been appointed a seat in the House of Lords, which enables him to become Minister for Trade and Investment without having to be elected as a Member of the lower house of Parliament. Livingston has seen BT go from a £134 million loss in 2008 when he was appointed, to a profit of £2.5 billion in 2012. It still has a monopoly over certain sectors of the British telecom market, and has won all the contracts so far for rolling out broadband to rural areas."

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