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China

Submission + - China's stealth fighter flight test successful (wsj.com)

Submitted by vencs
vencs writes: China has successfully tested its second stealth fighter, a smaller, twin-engine jet that military analysts said could potentially allow it to one day fly missions from an aircraft carrier. Military analysts said the new jet's design suggested the People's Liberation Army might use it to arm and escort aircraft carriers like the Liaoning , which was officially deployed last month. Andrei Chang, editor-in-chief of Kanwa Asian Defense Monthly, said the new prototype appears to have borrowed features from the US Air Force's twin-engine F-22 and US Navy's single-engine F-35C.
Canada

Submission + - Island's Historic Hotsprings Dry Up After Earthquake

Submitted by theshowmecanuck
theshowmecanuck writes: The National Post newspaper in Canada reports: "Days after the remote B.C. archipelago of Haida Gwaii emerged virtually unscathed from Canada’s second-strongest earthquake, locals discovered that the shifting earth had mysteriously switched off a centuries-old hot spring considered sacred by the Haida. ... A Parks Canada inspection party set out to investigate and stepped ashore to find that the island’s three main hot spring pools, which once bubbled with water as warm as 77 Celsius, were bone dry. “Not even a small puddle,” said Mr. Gladstone. Surrounding rocks, once warm to the touch, were cold." The earthquake measured 7.7 on the Richter scale.
Encryption

Submission + - Four years later, most U.S. Drones still Openly Broadcast Secret Video Feeds (coinurl.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Four years after discovering that militants were tapping into drone video feeds, the U.S. military still hasn’t secured the transmissions of more than half of its fleet of Predator and Reaper drones, Danger Room has learned. The majority of the aircraft still broadcast their classified video streams “in the clear” — without encryption. With a minimal amount of equipment and know-how, militants can see what America’s drones see.
Politics

Submission + - Why does a voting machine need calibration? (theblaze.com)

Submitted by Shotgun
Shotgun writes: I heard on the radio that there were some issues with voting machines in Greensboro, NC (my hometown), and the story said the machines just needed "recalibration". Which made me ask, "WTF? Why does a machine for choosing between one of a few choices need 'calibration'?" This story seems to explain the issue.
Unix

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Availability of Legacy UnixWare Installation Media?

Submitted by lukpac
lukpac writes: We have an old (ancient) Unisys server in production that hosts a legacy system and are attempting to virtualize it. Unfortunately we don't have a generic UnixWare (2.1.2) installation CD, just a Unisys specific one, and given the recent unpleasantness (see Groklaw for details), SCO isn’t much of an option. We’re not looking at pirating it (as above, we do still have the Unisys specific media), but do need a generic copy of UnixWare. What options, if any, are available?
Networking

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Is Samba4 a viable alternative to Active Directory?

Submitted by BluPhenix316
BluPhenix316 writes: I'm currently in school for Network Administration. I was discussing Linux with my instructor and he said the problem he has with Linux is he doesn't know of a good alternative to Active Directory. I did some research and from what I've read Samba 4 seems very promising. What are your thoughts?
Security

Submission + - Building the Ultimate Safe House

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Candace Jackson writes that an increasing number of home builders and buyers are looking for a new kind of security: homes equipped to handle everything from hurricanes, tornados and hybrid superstorms like this week's Sandy, to man-made threats ranging from home invasion to nuclear war and fueling the rise of these often-fortresslike homes are new technologies and building materials—which builders say will ultimately be used on a more widespread basis in storm- and earthquake-threatened areas. For example, Alys Beach, a 158-acre luxury seaside community on Florida's Gulf Coast, have earned the designation of Fortified...for safer living® homes and are designed to withstand strong winds. The roofs have two coats of limestone and exterior walls have 8 inches of concrete, reinforced every 32 inches for "bunkerlike" safety, according to marketing materials. Other builders are producing highly hurricane-proof residences that are circular in shape with "radial engineering" wherein roof and floor trusses link back to the home's center like spokes on a wheel, helping to dissipate gale forces around the structure with Deltec, a North Carolina–based builder, saying it has never lost a circular home to hurricanes in over 40 years of construction. But Doug Buck says some "extreme" building techniques don't make financial sense. "You get to a point of diminishing returns," says Buck. "You're going to spend so much that honestly, it would make more sense to let it blow down and rebuild it.""
Science

Submission + - Thousands of Lab Mice Lost in Sandy Flooding (slate.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: While New York University's Langone Medical Center in lower Manhattan was the site of heroism as 260 patients
were evacuated from flooded floors and nearly complete loss of power, similar floods at NYU's nearby Smilow Research Building killed thousands of laboratory mice, including genetically altered specimens in-bred over many generations as research subjects for melanoma and other diseases. Other laboratory animals, cells, and living tissue used in medical research were also lost; because of the gestation period involved, some projects were likely set back a number of years. Past experience with storms such as Allison in Houston and Katrina in New Orleans has shown that keeping laboratory animals in basements is not good practice, but research institutions keep doing it anyway.

Submission + - How should one dealing with a DDoS attack?

Submitted by TheUnFounded
TheUnFounded writes: A site that I administer was recently "held hostage" for the vast sum of $800. We were contacted by a guy (who was, it turns out, in Lebanon), who told us that he had been asked to perform a DDoS on our site by a competitor, and that they were paying him $600. He then said for $800, he would basically go away. Not a vast sum, but we weren't going to pay just because he said he "could" do something.

Within 5 minutes, our site was down.

The owner of the company negotiated with the guy, and he stopped his attack after receiving $400. A small price to pay to get the site online in our case. But obviously we want to come up with a solution that'll allow us to deal with these kinds of attacks in the future.

While the site was down, I contacted our hosting company, Rackspace. They proceeded to tell me that they have "DDoS mitigation services", but they cost $6,000 if your site is under attack at the time you use the service. Once the attack was over, the price dropped to $1500. (Nice touch there Rackspace, so much for Fanatical support; price gouging at its worst).

So, obviously, I'm looking for alternative solutions for DDoS mitigation. I'm considering CloudFlare (https://www.cloudflare.com/) as an option; does anyone have any other suggestions or thoughts on the matter?

Submission + - NYC Datacenters Should Get Power Saturday (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: "The local utility serving most of the New York City area, Con Edison, reported that it should begin supplying utility power to midtown and lower Manhattan by Saturday evening, returning the island’s data centers and citizens to some semblance of normalcy.

In the past few days, data center managers have been forced to add fuel logistics to their list of responsibilities, as most Manhattan data centers have been subsisting on generator power. That should come to an end, for the most part, when utility power is restored. In a possibly worrying note, Verizon warned late on Nov. 1 that its services to business customers could be impacted due to lack of fuel.
Below is the Nov. 2 update from many of the data-center providers and some of the communications providers in the area, some of which remain unchanged from previous days."
Government

Submission + - UK Takes Huge Step Forward on Open Standards (fsfe.org)

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes: "The UK government is certainly taking a long and winding road towards Free Software and Open Standards. The UK’s public sector doesn’t use a lot of Free Software, and many smaller Free Software companies have found it comparatively hard to get public sector buyers for their products and services. The main reason is that government agencies at all levels are locked into proprietary, vendor-specific file formats.

The UK government has released a new Open Standards policy. With this policy, and in particular with its strong definition of Open Standards, the UK government sets an example that governments elsewhere should aspire to",says Karsten Gerloff, President of the Free Software Foundation Europe. Under the new policy, effective immediately, patents that are essential to implementing a standard must be licensed without royalties or restrictions that would prevent their implementation in Free Software."
Science

Submission + - Crushed Silicon Triples Life of Li-Ion Batteries in the Lab (vice.com)

Submitted by derekmead
derekmead writes: Batteries rule everything around us, which makes breakthroughs a big deal. A research team at Rice says they have produced a nice jump: By using a crushed silicon anode in a lithium-ion battery, they claim to have nearly tripled the energy density of current li-ion designs.

Engineer Sibani Lisa Biswal and research scientist Madhuri Thakur reported in Nature’s Scientific Reports (it has yet to be published online) that by taking porous silicon and crushing it, they were able to dramatically decrease the volume required for anode material. Silicon has long been looked at as an anode material because it holds up to ten times more lithium ions than graphite, which is most commonly used commercially.

But it’s previously been difficult to create a silicon anode with enough surface area to cycle reliably. Silicon also expands when it’s lithiated, making it harder to produce a dense anode material. After previously testing a porous silicon “sponge,” the duo decided to try crushing the sponges to make them more compact. The result is a new battery design that holds a charge of 1,000 milliamp hours per gram through 600 tested charge cycles of two hours charging, two hours discharging. According to the team, current graphite anodes can only handle 350 mAh/g.
Iphone

Submission + - Tinkerer Invents iPhone Interface for Ham Radios (theepochtimes.com)

Submitted by jjp9999
jjp9999 writes: By using the same technology found in older modems, Thomas Tumino, vice president of the Hall of Science Amateur Radio Club, has invented an iPhone interface for ham radios. He told The Epoch Times, 'Today there are iPhone apps where you can use the systems in the phone—and its sound card, which is being used as a modem ... And then you connect that into your radio with an interface like this, that just isolates the telephone from the radio, and then you can do all sorts of things.'
Cloud

Submission + - US Government Says You Don't Own Your Cloud Data so We Can Access It At Any Time (eff.org) 2

Submitted by jest3r
jest3r writes: Yesterday the EFF filed a brief proposing a process for the Court in the Megaupload case to hold the government accountable for the actions it took (and failed to take) when it shut down Megaupload's service and denied third parties access to their property. Many businesses used Megaupload's cloud service to store and share files not related to piracy. The government is calling for a long, drawn-out process that would require individuals or small companies to travel to courts far away and engage in multiple hearings just to get their own property back. The government's argument that you lose all your property rights by storing your data on the cloud could apply to Amazon's S3 or Google Apps or or Apple iCloud services as well.
Censorship

Submission + - Nonpartisan Tax Report Removed After Republican Protest (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: On September 14th a PDF report titled "Taxes and the Economy: An Economic Analysis of the Top Tax Rates Since 1945" penned by the Library of Congress' nonpartisan Congressional Research Service was released to little fanfare. However the following conclusion of the report has since roiled the GOP enough to have the report removed from the Library of Congress: 'The results of the analysis suggest that changes over the past 65 years in the top marginal tax rate and the top capital gains tax rate do not appear correlated with economic growth. The reduction in the top tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment, and productivity growth. The top tax rates appear to have little or no relation to the size of the economic pie. However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution. As measured by IRS data, the share of income accruing to the top 0.1% of U.S. families increased from 4.2% in 1945 to 12.3% by 2007 before falling to 9.2% due to the 2007-2009 recession. At the same time, the average tax rate paid by the top 0.1% fell from over 50% in 1945 to about 25% in 2009. Tax policy could have a relation to how the economic pie is sliced—lower top tax rates may be associated with greater income disparities.' From the New York Times article: 'The pressure applied to the research service comes amid a broader Republican effort to raise questions about research and statistics that were once trusted as nonpartisan and apolitical.' It appears to no longer be found on the Library of Congress' website.

Submission + - WW2 carrier pigeon and undecoded message found in chimney (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by
BigBadBus
BigBadBus writes: "The BBC is reporting that the remains of a World War 2 carrier pigeon were found during renovation of a chimney in England. What is interesting is that the pigeon's remains still had its message attached to the leg ring; even more interesting, this is the first recorded instance of a code being used rather than plain text. The successor to WW2 code-breaking HQ Bletchley Park, the GCHQ, is trying to decipher this unique code. Maybe a slashdot reader can beat them to it?"
Hardware

Submission + - Past and Future: The Evolution of the Computer Keyboard (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: As anyone who's typed on a virtual keyboard — or yelled at a voice-control app like Siri — can attest, no current text input holds a candle to a traditional computer keyboard. From the reed switch keyboards of the early '70s to the buckling spring key mechanism that drove IBM's popular PC keyboards for years to ThinTouch technology that will have about half the travel of a MacBook Air's keys, the technology that drove data entry for decades isn't likely to go anyone anytime soon. Computerworld takes a look back on five decades of keyboard development and where it's likely to go in the future.
Power

Submission + - Solar Panel Breaks "Third of a Sun" Efficiency Barrier (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Embattled photovoltaic solar power manufacturer Amonix announced on Tuesday that it has broken the solar module efficiency record, becoming the first manufacturer to convert more than a third of incoming light energy into electricity – a goal once branded "one third of a sun" in a Department of Energy initiative. The Amonix module clocked an efficiency rating of 33.5 percent.
Patents

Submission + - Richard Stallman: Limit the Effect of Software Patents (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: We can't get rid of software patents, says Richard Stallman, but we could change how they apply to creating and using software and hardware. In an editorial at Wired, he advocates for a legislative solution to the patent wars that would protect both developers and users. Quoting: "We should legislate that developing, distributing, or running a program on generally used computing hardware does not constitute patent infringement. This approach has several advantages: —It doesn’t require classifying patents or patent applications as "software" or "not software." —It provides developers and users with protection from both existing and potential future computational idea patents. —Patent lawyers can’t defeat the intended effect by writing applications differently.'

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