FDA whistleblowers say government retaliated with spyware

A group of former FDA scientists who spoke out against the agency's allegedly flawed device-approval process are suing the feds for intercepting Gmail and Yahoo Mail messages by installing spy programs on their work computers. Although the computers were owned by the government, the plaintiffs say they were explicitly granted the right to use them for personal purposes. Back in January 2009, nine scientists known as the "FDA Nine" anonymously wrote to the leader of then President-elect Barack Obama's transition team "pleading with him to restructure the agency," the Wall Street Journal reported at the time[......]

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Arctic Cooling Announces New AMD Trinity APU-Powered HTPCs

Arctic Cooling may have earned its reputation on the back of its cooling products -- hence its name -- but late last year, it introduced a line of home theater PCs based on Intel's Atom chip. It must have been pretty well-received, because Arctic recently announced it was launching a new line of HTPCs. Why is that notable[......]

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"What we do is good": Pirate Bay lashes out as Swedish lawsuit finally ends

The Swedish lawsuit against four of The Pirate Bay's previous administrators concluded today as the country's Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal . Jail sentences and fines against the group now become final[......]

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Teen Anal Nightmare P2P lawyer charged with felony (Updated)

The saga of West Virginia's homegrown P2P porn lawyer appears headed to a strange, sad end after felony charges were filed against him in state court. Lawyer Kenneth J. Ford of Martinsville, West Virginia filed more than 22,000 "John Doe" lawsuits in 2010 against people across the country, accusing them of downloading super-raunchy films like Teen Anal Nightmare 2 and Juicy White Anal Booty 4 from the Internet. [......]

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Pro-government hactivists deface Al Jazeera coverage of Syrian violence

An image posted to the Al Jazeera Syria Live Blog by hackers supporting President Assad. The Al Jazeera English website was attacked and defaced on January 29 by hackers supporting Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Targeting the news organization's " Syria Live Blog ," which has been providing ongoing coverage of the Arab League's observer mission to Syria and developments in the ongoing unrest in the country, the hacker group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army posted pro-Assad and pro-Syrian government images to the site[......]

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Nintendo Network: DLC, User Accounts for 3DS and Wii U

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata announced a new digital network for the 3DS handheld and upcoming Wii U consoles that will finally bring the company's online operations up to par with its competitors, or so Nintendo hopes. [......]

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XFX Silently Strips New Radeon Cards of ‘Double Lifetime Warranty’

One of the big draws to buying an XFX brand videocard is the modder friendly warranty that lets users swap heatsinks and overclock ther GPUs without voiding the so-called 'Double Lifetime Warranty,' which is marketing speak for a lifetime guarantee that's transferable to a second owner (provided you registere your card within 30 days of purchase). Now we're hearing that this awesome backing won't apply to AMD's new Radeon HD 7000 series[......]

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Feature: Mega-man: The fast, fabulous, fraudulent life of Megaupload’s Kim Dotcom

Since the shutdown of Megaupload, stories have erupted about the life and exploits of the company's founder, a self-styled "Dr. Evil" of file sharing. Kim Dotcom's opulent digs, high-end cars, fondness for models and other Bond-villain-esque behaviors have been splashed across websites and have confused evening newscasts for the last week[......]

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AMD Accelerated Processing Unit Shipments a Bright Spot as Revenue Falls Flat

AMD won't be popping open any champagne bottles to celebrate 2011, during which time the Santa Clara chip maker pulled in $6.57 billion in revenue, falling flat year-over-year. Revenue also fell flat sequentially at $1.69 billion, representing a net loss of $177 million, or $0.24 per share, along with operating income of $71 million[......]

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AIDA64 Updated to Support New CPUs and GPUs

AIDA64, the benchmarking, system monitoring, and diagnostic software formerly known as Everest, has been updated to version 2.20 by FinalWire with new features and support for current and upcoming processors and GPUs. [......]

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Victorinox SSD Mixes A Swiss Army Knife With A 1TB SSD

One of the major problems with covering all of the news flowing out of CES is that inevitably, something nifty gets missed. This year, we were so busy reporting on Ultrabooks and AMD chips that we totally glossed over what may be the most awesome survival tool of all time; a Swiss Army knife with a whopping 1TB hard drive built in. Whether you need to pry open a can of beans, file your nails, or transfer over 220 million pages of text, this bad boy's got you covered. [......]

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Dual-Core Ivy Bridge CPUs Reportedly Shipping Second Week of May

Those of you holding out to build a low cost system around Intel's Ivy Bridge platform will have to sit through an intial wave of quad-core processors before the dual-core variants are released. [......]

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Supreme Court holds warrantless GPS tracking unconstitutional

The second of two GPS trackers found recently on the vehicle of a young man in California. All nine justices of the Supreme Court ruled on Monday that police officers violated the Fourth Amendment rule against unreasonable search and seizure when they attached a GPS device to a suspect's car and tracked it for 28 days without a warrant[......]

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Throwing Hollywood under the bus could pay dividends for GOP

Sen. Al Franken (D-Hollywood) A striking trend in Congress's reaction to Wednesday's protests against the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act was the partisan divide in the Senate. At least 16 Republican Senators—more than a third of all GOP members in the body— declared their opposition to PIPA for the first time on Wednesday. [......]

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Google cut off Megaupload’s ad money voluntarily back in 2007

The federal government's 72-page indictment of file hosting site Megaupload is stuffed with odd bits of information. Take page 34, for instance, which features a single paragraph about Google's AdSense program. [......]

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