Rapidshare is legal, finds German court

Techworld.com reports about a decision of a German court that Rapidshare has a legal businessmodel and does not have to scan the files during the upload process. They are ruled actively monitor incoming links from external sites to the files it hosts and take down any illegal files thus identified. That 's a existing policy of Rapidshare but has been voluntarily so far. Rapidshare will appeal because they think it's wrong to turn hosters into policemen through the means of laws and court rulings. To be continued!

Microsoft SQL Server medusa turned into cloud pussy cat

The Register reports about startup DH2i's DxConsole which virtualises the MS SQL Server database's processes.
Clients using the virtualised SQL Server instances think they are accessing their own private copy of the software but they are not; they are using a shared infrastructure of databases, servers and storage, with the DxConsole product keeping track of which client is doing what and turning Microsoft's sequel serpent into a private cloud utility.

It looks like that after server virtualisation, app virtualisation is the next big thing.

A cloaking device from off-the-shelf superconductors and magnetic tape

Ars Technica reports about a "cloaking" technique under relatively simple laboratory conditions. As stated the real achievement of the experiment is: producing magnetic masking with relatively inexpensive components, as opposed to previous cloaks that require exotic materials and often much colder temperatures.
It is not ductape with some icecream yet but it is a real step forward.

Sen. Wyden demands vote on American copyright, patent treaties

Ars Technica reports about two amendments of Senator Wyden one which will force ACTA to come before Congress for approval. And two will make the US Trade Representative, which negotiates US trade deals, drop the veil of secrecy around its copyright and patent negotiations. Of course they have not been voted but the fact that they exist give hope that the big media have not won yet. They do have deep pockets though so the battle is not over.

Fujitsu's supercomputing MONSTER thrashes Top 500 rivals

The Register reports about the fastest numbercruncher today: Fujitsu's K computer with its confirmed 1st place as emperor of the Top 500 supercomputer list with a ball-breaking 10.51 petaflops. The second system is a 2.566 Pflop Tianhe-1A supercomputer at the Chinese National Supercomputing Centre in Tianjin, made by NUDT. Third is a Cray Jaguar at the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory, rated at 1.759 PfLops.

The numbers involved are bizarrely large. The K computer has 17.6PB of storage, mostly Fujitsu Eternus arrays. There are 864 racks, housing 88,128 SPARC64 VIIIfx processors: each one a node in the system. Each processor has 8 cores, running at 12Gflops and 2GHz, connected by a Tofu 6D mesh torus interconnect that can support more than 100,000 nodes. That means a grand total of 705,024 cores. This baby is a monster!

Anonymous, Decentralized and Uncensored File-Sharing is Booming

The arms race between media corporations and filesharers continues. According to TorrentFreak the next generation filesharing is here and it is anonymous, decentralised and uncensored. Retroshare is such a program although it exists since 2006. After the loss of fileshare host Megaupload and the proposed SOPA legislation, downloads of the program are booming. It will take some time before becoming as easy and usefull as torrentclients and magnetlinks but it will. Of course the large media corporations will ask for more and especially more ugly legislation then SOPA was but they can not win and they should know that.