According to a new report published today by The Verge, developers behind the Enyo will soon be leaving HP to join Google. It’s not yet clear, however, how they will be integrated into Google’s workforce. It's also unclear how many developers are moving.

It seems unlikely that Google intends to invest in webOS, but its worth noting that Enyo could potentially be used in a wide range of other environments. The expertise of Enyo developers could be useful if Google is looking to build a Web runtime for Android to serve as an alternative to the platform’s Java-based development stack. Enyo could also help provide a standardized application development framework for Google’s Chrome OS.

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The statement may not be (read: it's probably not) entirely true. As French site Numerama points out, Seydoux preceeds that proclamation by saying that the ALPA detected 110 million incidents of audiovisual piracy and sent 8.7 million notices to Hadopi, the government office that deals with the law of the same name. "We can hardly believe that in this volume not a single incident involves the pirating of French films," Numerama declared. According to the ALPA and Gaumont, illegal downloads of movies (presumably only international films) saw a 50 percent reduction in the last year.

In his statement, Seydoux said that illegal movie streaming sites have been harder to stifle. He did applaud the delisting of several infringing sites, as well as the arrest and imprisonment of three illegal streaming site administrators and one illegal supplier of movies before their release date.

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Fox, in a statement, attacked Dish in fairly harsh terms.

"We were given no choice but to file suit against one of our largest distributors, Dish Network, because of their surprising move to market a product with the clear goal of violating copyrights and destroying the fundamental underpinnings of the broadcast television ecosystem," the statement read. “Their wrongheaded decision requires us to take swift action in order to aggressively defend the future of free, over-the-air television."

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According to Computerworld, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is building a storage infrastructure consisting of 380 petabytes of magnetic tape capacity and 25 petabytes of disk storage. It's all to support the petaflop-scale Blue Waters supercomputer. The NCSA says it is building the system to "predict the behavior of complex biological systems, understand how the cosmos evolved after the Big Bang, design new materials at the atomic level, predict the behavior of hurricanes and tornadoes, and simulate complex engineered systems like the power distribution system and airplanes and automobiles."

The 25PB of disk will act as online storage for data that must be rapidly accessed, while the tape library is categorized as nearline, sort of a compromise between online storage and backup systems. With 380,000 AMD Opteron 6200 Series x86 processors, the cluster will use 40Gbps Ethernet technology with aggregate throughput of up to a terabyte per second, Computerworld reported.

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The complaint stems from allegations that RealNetworks charged customers for services they weren't subscribed to. "Deceptive prechecked boxes and fine print obligated consumers to not-so-free trials for subscription services they didn't want in the first place," said Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna.

RealNetworks said the complaint relates to subscriptions between January 1, 2007 and December 31, 2009. In addition to the $2 million fund, the company will pay $400,000 to the attorney general's office for legal costs.

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One of the unfortunate memes that has made repeated appearances in the climate debate is that money isn't just influencing the public debate about science, but it's also influencing the science itself. The government, the argument goes, is paying scientists specifically to demonstrate that carbon dioxide is the major culprit in recent climate change, and the money available to do so is exploding.

Although the argument displays a profound misunderstanding of how science and science funding work, it's just not going away. Just this week, one of the sites where people congregate to criticize mainstream climate science once again repeated it, replete with the graph below. That graph originated in a 2009 report from a think tank called the Science & Public Policy Institute (notable for using the serially confused Christopher Monckton as a policy advisor).

The report, called "Climate Money: The climate industry: $79 billion so far—trillions to come" (PDF) and prepared by Australian journalist Joanne Nova for the Science & Public Policy Institute, claims to show how money has distorted climate science. There are several aspects to this argument, but we'll start with the money itself.

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It's hard to look at the basic plot structure for Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 and not see some sort of overarching political message. This is a game that imagines the year 2025 where autonomous and remote controlled drones have become a ubiquitous part of war. As the lead voice in the game's trailer puts it, "technology got stronger while we got weaker." When antagonist Raul Menendez takes control of our drones and turns them against us, the human side of the formula seems substantially outmatched.

Meanwhile, in the real world of today, drone warfare is coming under increasing attack both from a legal and moral perspective. By limiting the personal risk to remote-operating soldiers, and by giving the military the ability to conduct "targeted killings" from across the globe with limited oversight, drones are already changing the way we think about traditional armed conflict. The obvious message of Black Ops 2 seems to be that these rapid changes to the basic nature of war might not be entirely positive.

Treyarch Studio head Mark Lamia, insists that his team "wasn't going after any sort of political stance" in focusing on drone warfare in Black Ops 2. That said, he sees the game's plot, in part, as a classic, cautionary tale of the unintended consequences of technological advancement.

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Microsoft wants Windows developers to write Windows 8-specific, Metro-style, touch-friendly applications, and to make sure that they crank these apps out, the company has decided that Visual Studio 11 Express, the free-to-use version of its integrated development environment, can produce nothing else.

If you want to develop desktop applications—anything that runs at the command line or on the conventional Windows desktop that remains a fully supported, integral, essential part of Windows 8—you'll have two options: stick with the current Visual C++ 2010 Express and Visual C# 2010 Express products, or pay about $400-500 for Visual Studio 11 Professional. A second version, Visual Studio 11 Express for Web, will be able to produce HTML and JavaScript websites, and nothing more.

Visual Studio 11 is an improvement in many ways over Visual Studio 2010. Its C++ compiler, for example, is a great deal more standards-compliant, especially with the new C++ 11 specification. It has powerful new optimization features, such as the ability to automatically use CPU features like SSE2 to accelerate mathematically intensive programs, and new language features to allow programs to be executed on the GPU. The new version of the C# language makes it easier to write programs that do their work on background threads and avoid making user interfaces unresponsive. The .NET Framework, updated to version 4.5, includes new capabilities for desktop applications, such as a ribbon control for Microsoft's WPF GUI framework.

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Who complains loudest about Google linking to infringing content in its search results? The movie and music industries, of course, who absolutely delight in taking whacks at the search engine. But thanks to a huge new trove of data released today by Google, we know that the worldwide top takedown requestor—by far—is actually Microsoft.

Anatomizing takedowns

If content owners claim that a Google search result links to infringing material, Google will remove the link. But just how many times does this happen—and who is making all the requests? Google today rolled out an upgrade to its "Transparency Report" that shows private copyright takedown information in addition to the usual government requests for user information or for censorship.

In the last month, Google's search engine has received requests to remove links to 1.13 million URLs hosted on 23,000 distinct domains. (Takedown requests to YouTube and other Google properties are not covered under the current data release.) I spoke to Fred von Lohmann, senior copyright counsel at Google, who said that the company does in fact remove 97 percent of the requested links after running them through both algorithmic and human review to catch mistakes or bad faith notices. The average turnaround time for a takedown is 11 hours, which von Lohmann called "the best in the industry."

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"Outside of South Africa, there is little to no capacity for cloud computing on the continent," wrote Erik Hersman on his blog, White African. "This means that few of the programmers in this region have the skill sets necessary to work and build out this infrastructure. We have a severely limited foundation on which to build future services in an increasingly cloud-based computing world."

Hersman is co-founder of the iHub and the crisis mapping software outfit Ushahidi.

Steps have now been taken that will lead to HPC capability, creating a 24-node cluster that will come online at Kenya's fantastic iHub idea factory this summer.

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The mayor of a small New Jersey hamlet has been arrested, along with his son, on federal charges that they shut down a website advocating the mayor's recall after breaking into the online accounts of political foes.

According to federal officials, Felix Roque, the 55-year-old mayor of West New York, New Jersey, and his son, Joseph Roque, 22, were arrested early Thursday morning by FBI agents. In February, the pair planned and executed the silencing of www.recallroque.com by gaining unauthorized access to the GoDaddy account used to control the domain name. An FBI special agent filed documents with these allegations in a New Jersey federal court. The father-and-son team also obtained e-mails and messages sent among opponents after gaining unauthorized access to e-mail and Facebook accounts.

"I have always treated you with respect and courtesy, but I have copies of everything sent to the website and communications with names," Mayor Roque wrote in an e-mail to one of the opponents, whose identity had remained unknown to the Roques until they gained illegal access to the accounts. "Remember, I am in the Army with many friends."

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Meteorites from Mars contain specks of graphite-like carbon trapped within them. There have been a variety of explanations for this reduced form of carbon over the years, with some even viewing it as an indication of life on the Red Planet. But new evidence indicates that the rock holding the carbon is volcanic in origin and originated from deep inside the planet, not from living organisms. This helps scientists narrow down possible chemical reactions on the planet that could create building blocks for life, the researchers say.

Scientists have found reduced carbon compounds, like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, in various meteorites with a Martian origin over the past 15 years. They’re particularly interested in this type of carbon—as opposed to the oxidized carbon in carbon dioxide and carbonate minerals—because it contains carbon-carbon bonds critical to life as we know it.

There are many different ways that these compounds can form in space, so finding reduced carbon in the meteorites tells scientists very little about how it got there in the first place. Still, attempts to explain its origin abound. Using clues from the rocks themselves and the Mars environment, ideas include the possibility of living organisms, condensation from volcanic gases, to contamination once the rocks fell to Earth.

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Since taking over for former Apple CEO Steve Jobs last August, newly minted CEO Tim Cook has slowly made a number of changes to how things are done at the company. Whereas Jobs was mercurial, Cook is apparently genteel. Whereas Jobs downplayed labor issues in China, Cook has personally visited factory floors and met with Chinese officials.

Fortune editor Adam Lashinsky, who recently detailed Apple's inner workings in his book Inside Apple, is well suited to note such "subtle but significant changes." In a recently published report for Fortune, Lashinsky makes the case that Cook is leaving an indelible mark on Apple and its corporate culture.

Though Cook is maintaining "most" of Apple's corporate culture, largely implemented by Jobs since he took the helm in 1997, he is reportedly "taking action that Apple sorely needed and employees badly wanted." And while many of the changes seem positive, not everyone is so sure that those changes are necessarily for the better.

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The apps, which were designed to appear as legitimate games including Angry Birds Space, Cut the Rope, and Assassin's Creed, actually hid a copy of malware known as RuFraud, according to a report from ITPro. When opened, these apps sent three premium SMS messages at a cost of £5 ($7.84) each through a "shortcode" operated by A1 Agregator Limited. The SMS traffic was actively suppressed on the users' phones, so victims wouldn't notice the abuse until and unless they reviewed their cell phone bill for the month.

PhonePayPlus, which regulates premium phone numbers in the UK, says 1,391 users were charged £27,850 ($43,668.80) before the scam was detected, money which will be refunded to those affected. Google removed the apps from the service late last year, ahead of the newly issued fines.

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“I hear a lot of noise, like someone has a fountain going in the background or something.”

“Let’s all hang up and come back individually so we can figure out who’s causing that echo.”

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Apple has accused the US government of siding "with monopoly, rather than competition" by suing Apple and six publishers for allegedly colluding to fix e-book prices. Apple's response to the Department of Justice's lawsuit offers strong words for the DoJ and those who believe Apple has engaged in a conspiracy with publishers in order to give itself an advantage in the market.

Right off the bat, Apple's response calls the DoJ's complaint "fundamentally flawed as a matter of fact and law." The electronics giant says it negotiated individual agreements with each publisher so Apple could enter the e-book market, arguing that before the launch of the iBookstore in 2010, the only real player in the e-book space was Amazon and its Kindle Store.

"At the time Apple entered the market, Amazon sold nearly nine out of every ten eBooks, and its power over price and product selection was nearly absolute," Apple wrote. "Apple’s entry spurred tremendous growth in eBook titles, range and variety of offerings, sales, and improved quality of the eBook reading experience."

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After weeks of teasing and a slow drip of character reveals, Double Fine and Sega have finally revealed more details about the Ron Gilbert-designed The Cave, an action-adventure/puzzle game that is being described as a mix between games like Gilbert's Maniac Mansion and Metroid/Castlevania-style exploration.

Players will choose three of seven potential characters, each of which is searching for something a bit allegorical in the titular cave. They can either switch between them in single-player mode or explore with up to two other local cohorts. While The Cave's protagonists will all be silent, the cave itself ends up being one of the most defined characters in the game, narrating the action and opining on philosophical topics throughout.

The Cave has the run-and-jump controls of a platform game, but the focus is on adventure-style puzzles that require teamwork and sometimes ridiculous logic to solve. To give you an idea of the adventure-game logic involved, one puzzle described in early previews reportedly involved fixing a hot dog vending machine with water, then using the meat tube and a bell to lure a dragon into a knight's path.

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Motorola, which became a Google subsidiary several days ago, was found to infringe a European patent that covers the sending and receiving of SMS messages that would otherwise violate cellular network size restrictions by breaking the message up into parts and reassembling them on the receiving end. Motorola was cleared of infringing a second patent on technology that makes it easier to provide applications that work in multiple languages.

We haven't been able to get a written copy of the ruling from Munich, but Microsoft confirmed the ruling, saying the injunction means Motorola must get a license for the patent, stop using the patented feature, or stop selling products using the feature in Germany. “We’re pleased the court agreed today that Motorola has infringed Microsoft’s intellectual property, and we hope Motorola will be willing to join other Android device makers by taking a license to our patents,” Microsoft Deputy General Counsel David Howard said in a statement.

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Apple has introduced significant improvements to the iPhone's camera capabilities in nearly every iteration of the device. And while rumors about the next-generation iPhone have largely concerned screen sizes and exotic materials, very little has been rumored about the camera thus far.

We decided to examine some potential technologies Apple could incorporate into the next iPhone to boost its photographic flair. Because the iPhone's camera is a combination of sensor and lens hardware controlled with software, we'll look at each part separately.

Hardware

The iPhone 4S camera hardware is already pretty capable, especially given the constraints of the device's size. It currently features an 8 megapixel sensor with backside illumination and a "full-well" design, technologies used to maximize its light gathering capabilities and dynamic range. Its five-element autofocus lens is sharp and provides even illumination across the image. And its "Hybrid IR" filter helps maximize color accuracy and sharpness.

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Dogs were the very first creatures that humans domesticated, and their remains have been found along with those of humans from before we even had basic things like agriculture. And, with the advent of molecular tools, researchers were able to identify the animal that was domesticated (the gray wolf), as well as a handful of breeds that appear to be "ancient," and split off close to the source of domestication.

It was a nice picture, but apparently it was probably wrong. That's the conclusion of a study that appeared in this week's PNAS, which uses a combination of genetic, archeological, and historic evidence to argue that the history of domestic dogs is such a mess that we're not going to be able to unravel it without resorting to large-scale genome sequencing efforts.

The challenges of sorting out what happened from archeological remains are significant. The source of domesticated dogs, the gray wolf, historically ranged across all of North America, Europe, and Asia. The earliest domesticated dogs, which appeared about 15,000 years ago, looked a whole lot like the wolves they were descended from, making unambiguous identification of domestic vs. wild animals a challenge. And once things that were clearly dogs started appearing, they appeared over a huge geographic range. The earliest remains appear in Europe, the Middle East, and Kamchatka (on Russia's Pacific coast) all within 1,500 years of each other. Within another thousand years after that, domestic dogs were present in North America, as well.

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The effort, which is led by researchers at NC State, is called the Android Malware Genome Project. The name alludes to the scientific undertaking of gene mapping. The security researchers similarly aim to unravel the constituent parts of Android malware and figure out how it all fits together. They hope that this will eventually pave the way for coming up with better and more proactive defense mechanisms.

According to the project’s website, the malware research collected by NC State has already been shared with 27 other organizations around the world. The recipients appear to all be universities and technology companies.

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Yahoo also released an iOS implementation of Axis—a standalone Web browser application built with the platform-supplied WebKit HTML renderer. It works much like other popular third-party browsers for iOS, such as Dolphin and Mercury. Axis isn't available for Android at this time.

The core feature of Axis is interactive search. It has a text box in which the user can input a search query or an address. As the user types, Axis will show autocompletion options in a vertical list. Alongside the list, it displays a horizontal container with search results.

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Hewlett-Packard has seen hard times lately, but in an earnings call today the company tried to spin the layoff of about eight percent of its workforce as a necessary austerity measure. HP is making the layoffs as part of a restructuring plan that aims to make the company more competitive with IT companies like IBM.

In the PC market, the company joined Dell in reporting disappointing sales this quarter, and Bloomberg suggests that demand for smartphones and tablets is eating away at HP's bottom line. CEO Meg Whitman said the company needs to boost Research and Development spending—currently at $3.25 billion a year—to bring new products to market.

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"Kind of scary, and nothing I had any business looking at," Ben Sedat, an engineer for Tinfoil Security, wrote in a blog post documenting the experience. "This was something that I ran into completely organically, no shenanigans or security testing on my part (we need approval from a site's owner to run most security testing, and I'm not going to go out and violate wire fraud laws.)"

Sedat said the late-night flub happened after he had spent a few hours online booking a last-minute flight. He had kept several browser tabs open over that time. He suspects the information leak was the result of improper session management and authentication, a class of vulnerability listed on the Top 10 list maintained by the Open Web Application Security Project.

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Backers of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate companion, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), have been railing against the bill's critics ever since the legislation plunged to a fiery death earlier this year. The unprecedented online protest by Google, reddit, Wikipedia, Ars Technica, Wired, and others was, the backers say, largely about misleading the public.

But not every backer got the message. As PIPA co-sponsor Senator Chris Coons admitted today, SOPA "really did pose some risk to the Internet."

Change in tone?

Back in January, MPAA boss Chris Dodd raged against his critics:

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