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CWmike writes "Just two days after launching its Buzz social networking tools, Google said Thursday night that it had tweaked the technology to address early privacy concerns. Google said in a blog post that the quick updates makes it easier for users to block access to their pages and eases the path to finding two privacy features. 'We've had plenty of feature requests, and some direct feedback,' wrote Todd Jackson, a product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz, in the blog post. 'In particular there's been concern from some people who thought their contacts were being made public without their knowledge (in particular the lists of people they follow, and the people following them). In addition, others felt they had too little control over who could follow them and were upset that they lacked the ability to block people who didn't yet have public profiles from following them.'"

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Hugh Pickens writes "Pete Carey writes in the Mercury News that there are 'clear warning signs' that Silicon Valley has entered 'a new phase of uncertainty' in which its standing as a tech center is at risk and that decisive action by business, government and education is needed if the region is to retain its standing as the world's center of technical innovation. 'It could be that Silicon Valley has a different future coming,' says Russell Hancock. 'It's not a given that we will continue to be the epicenter of innovation.' Among the troubling indicators in the Silicon Valley Index (PDF): 90,000 jobs lost in the last two years; the influx of foreign science and engineering talent has slowed; venture capital funding has declined; per capita income is down 5 percent from 2007; and the number of people working as contractors rather than full-time employees is rising. Adding to the valley's problems is a malfunctioning state government that is shortchanging investment in education and infrastructure."

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MikeChino writes "Porsche has just unveiled its 911 GT3 R Hybrid, a 480 horsepower track vehicle ready to rock the 24-hour Nurburgring race this May. Porsche's latest supercar will use the same 911 production platform available to consumers today, with a few race-ready features including front-wheel hybrid drive and an innovative flywheel system that stores kinetic energy from braking and then uses it to provide a 160 horsepower burst of speed. The setup is sure to offer an advantage when powering out of turns and passing by other racers."

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An anonymous reader writes "A couple of times in my career, I've inherited a fairly large (30-40 thousand lines) collection of code. The original authors knew it because they wrote it; I didn't, and I don't. I spend a huge amount of time finding the right place to make a change, far more than I do changing anything. How would you learn such a big hunk of code? And how discouraged should I be that I can't seem to 'get' this code as well as the original developers?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "University of Michigan researchers have crammed an ARM Cortex microcontroller, a thin-film battery, and a solar cell into a package that is only 9 cubic millimeters in volume. The system is able to run perpetually by periodically recharging the on-board battery with a solar cell (neglecting physical wear-out of the system)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An article on volunteer computing appeared today in the Argentine newspaper La Nacion.

Version 6.10 of the BOINC client software has been released for general use. Download it here.

The Fifth BOINC Workshop was held Oct. 22-23 in Barcelona. There were 35 attendees and 21 excellent talks; many of the presentation slides and discussion notes are online.

The Windows versions of 6.6.41 have been recalled due to a version mismatch with recent Microsoft updates. Please use the 6.6.38 version until 6.10 is released.

An article in the Wall Street Journal discusses the use of volunteer computing in medical research.

Gianni Urso is interviewed by Bruno Moretti Turri on radio astronomy, SETI@home, and BOINC distributed computing (31 min., in Italian)

We started sending out our annual year-end donation drive mass e-mail. The process could take days. If you didn't get one (possibly due to spam blocking), you can read the same letter on-line here. Thank you!!!

SETI@home Project Scientist Eric Korpela has posted an FAQ and comments about the forced resignation at Higley Unified School District in Arizona

The connectivity problem noted yesterday turned out to be one of our switches and not the router. We swapped in a replacement switch today and connectivity was restored.

Our router, which connects all of our data servers to the Internet, is down. Until we resolve this, the project is unable to send out work or receive results.