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Japan

Fukishima Springs Water Leak 163

Posted by timothy from the thought-it-was-hope-that-springs-eternal dept.
sl4shd0rk writes "The Japanese Fukishima crisis took a turn for the worse this week as it was found a barrier built to contain contaminated water has been breached; a leak defined by 20 trillion to 40 trillion becquerels of radioactive tritium. This is yet another problem on top of a spate of errors plaguing the 2011 nuclear disaster site. Nuclear regulatory official Shinji Kinjo has cited Tokyo Electric Power Company as having a 'weak sense of crisis' as well as hinted at previous bunglings by TEPCO as the reason one cannot 'just leave it up to Tepco alone.' If Nuclear energy is ever to move forward, these types of disasters need to be eliminated."
China

Japan Unveils Largest Warship Since WW2 282

Posted by timothy from the would-you-like-to-play-some-brinksmanship? dept.
schwit1 writes with an excerpt from an AP story on some interesting technology afloat: "Japan on Tuesday unveiled its biggest warship since World War II, a huge flat-top destroyer that has raised eyebrows in China and elsewhere because it bears a strong resemblance to a conventional aircraft carrier. Some experts believe the new Japanese ship could potentially be used in the future to launch fighter jets or other aircraft that have the ability to take off vertically. The ship, which has a flight deck that is nearly 250 meters (820 feet) long, is designed to carry up to 14 helicopters.Though the ship — dubbed 'Izumo' — has been in the works since 2009, its unveiling comes as Japan and China are locked in a dispute over several small islands located between southern Japan and Taiwan. For months, ships from both countries have been conducting patrols around the isles, called the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyutai in China."
Earth

NASA Data Suggests Solar Magnetic Field About To Flip 127

Posted by timothy from the we're-all-gonna-die dept.
Freddybear writes "According to measurements from NASA solar observatories, the sun's magnetic field is about to reverse polarity. The event is predicted to occur within the next three to four months and will have effects throughout the solar system. These magnetic reversals happen regularly about every eleven years as part of the solar cycle."
Upgrades

Forget Flash: Resistive RAM Crams 1TB Onto Tiny Chip 287

Posted by timothy from the promising-promising dept.
nk497 writes "Flash memory could soon be a thing of the past, according to U.S. startup Crossbar, which claims it's close to bringing resistive RAM (RRAM) to the market. Crossbar is touting impressive specs for the RRAM technology, promising 20 times the write performance at a fraction of the power consumption and size of the current best-in-class NAND flash modules — and squeezing terabytes of storage capacity onto a single chip the size of a postage stamp. The company also claims its technology can retain data for up to 20 years, compared with the standard one to three years with NAND flash."
Programming

Using Zillow's Creative Commons Neighborhood Boundary Data For the U.S. 32

Posted by timothy from the underlaying-overlays dept.
reifman writes "Zillow quietly released boundary data for more than 7,000 neighborhoods in the U.S. via the Creative Commons attribute-sharealike license but few people know how to integrate this data into their applications. This tutorial describes how to import the data and integrate it with Google Maps and HTML5 Geolocation."
Security

TOR Wants You To Stop Using Windows, Disable JavaScript 341

Posted by timothy from the so-say-we-all dept.
itwbennett writes "The TOR Project is advising that people stop using Windows after the discovery of a startling vulnerability in Firefox that undermined the main advantages of the privacy-centered network. The zero-day vulnerability allowed as-yet-unknown interlopers to use a malicious piece of JavaScript to collect crucial identifying information on computers visiting some websites using The Onion Router (TOR) network. 'Really, switching away from Windows is probably a good security move for many reasons,' according to a security advisory posted Monday by The TOR Project."
Open Source

The Open Source Laptop and the Golden Age of Open Hardware 93

Posted by timothy from the not-quite-capsela dept.
An anonymous reader writes to this short feature featuring "Andrew 'Bunnie' Huang on why he decided to build an open source laptop, how the slowing of Moore's Law is making it easier for individuals and small outfits to compete against major corporations in the computer hardware market and what hobbyist hardware makers in the U.S. could learn from China's Shanzhai, famed for their cheap clones of the iPhone and other popular handsets."
Bug

Xerox Photocopiers Randomly Alter Numbers, Says German Researcher 290

Posted by timothy from the we-think-you-meant-9 dept.
First time accepted submitter sal_park writes "According to a report from German computer scientist D. Kriesel, some Xerox WorkCentre copiers and scanners may alter numbers that appear in scanned documents. Having analyzed the output of two such devices, the Xerox WorkCentre 7535 and 7556, Kriesel found that "patches of the pixel data are randomly replaced in a very subtle and dangerous way": in particular, some numbers appearing in a document may be replaced by other numbers when it is scanned."
Data Storage

Samsung Begins Mass Production of Industry's First 3D NAND Flash 56

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the stacked-bits dept.
Lucas123 writes "Samsung has announced it is mass producing the industry's first three-dimensional (3D) Vertical NAND (V-NAND) flash memory that breaks through current planar NAND scaling limits, offering gains in both density and non-volatile memory performance. The first iteration of the V-NAND is a 24-layer, 128Gbit chip that will eventually be used in embedded flash and solid-state drive applications, Samsung said. It provides 2 to 10 times higher reliability and twice the write performance of conventional 10nm-class floating gate NAND flash memory. Initial device capacities will range from 128GB to 1TB, 'depending on customer demand.' 'In the future, they could go considerably higher than that,' said Steve Weinger, director of NAND Marketing for Samsung Semiconductor. Samsung's process uses cell structure based on 3D Charge Trap Flash (CTF) technology and vertical interconnect process technology to link the 3D cell array. By applying the latter technologies, Samsung's 3D V-NAND can provide over twice the scaling of current 20nm-class planar NAND flash."
Crime

Administration Seeks To Make Unauthorized Streaming A Felony 398

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the share-your-way-to-jail dept.
wabrandsma writes "From the Washington Post: 'You probably remember the online outrage over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) copyright enforcement proposal. Last week, the Department of Commerce's Internet Policy Task Force released a report on digital copyright policy that endorsed one piece of the controversial proposal: making the streaming of copyrighted works a felony. As it stands now, streaming a copyrighted work over the Internet is considered a violation of the public performance right. The violation is only punishable as a misdemeanor, rather than the felony charges that accompany the reproduction and distribution of copyrighted material.'"
Piracy

Russian Church of Kopimizma Rallies For Battle Against New Piracy Laws 77

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the that's-one-plan dept.
colinneagle writes "File-sharing advocates are seeking to spread the Missionary Church of Kopimism, a religion steeped in file sharing as a philosophical concept, to Russia in an effort to overturn the country's controversial new anti-piracy law. Activists in several parts of Russia — Moscow, St. Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan and Khabarovsk — are applying to form an officially recognized church of Kopimism, which they hope will enable them to challenge the anti-piracy law. ... Activists are reportedly planning to file lawsuits challenging the law as soon as the applications are filed. However, Russian lawyers and lawmakers told a Russian news site that the country's separation of church and state will make it difficult to make any progress through this approach. Kopimism was legally recognized by Sweden's government, where the religion was first founded, in January 2012."
Security

Wi-Fi Pineapple Hacking Device Sells Out At DEF CON 132

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the but-it-doesn't-taste-like-a-pineapple dept.
darthcamaro writes "At the recent DEF CON conference over the weekend, vendor were selling all kinds of gear. But one device stood out from all the others: the Wi-Fi Pineapple — an all in one Wi-Fi hacking device that costs only $80 (a lot cheaper than a PwnPlug) and powered by a very vibrant open source community of users. Pineapple creator Darren Kitchen said that 1.2 Pineapple's per minute were sold on the first day of DEF CON (and then sold out). The Pineapple run Linux, based on OpenWRT, is packed with open source tools including Karma, DNS Spoof, SSL Strip, URL Snarf, Ngrep, and more and is powered by g a 400MHz Atheros AR9331 MIPS processor, 32MB of main memory and a complete 802.11 b/g/n stack. Is this a tool that will be used for good — or for evil?"
Hardware

EUV Chipmaking Inches Forward 32

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the extreme-lithography dept.
szotz writes "You've got falling droplets of molten tin, bright lasers, and fancy evacuated optics. What's not to love about EUV light sources? The fact that we still don't have them in production lines producing chips. Light source maker ASML says it's 'more confident' that the technology's on track now, and that the machines should meet their target brightness by 2015, in time to help pattern the 10nm generation of chips — the next next generation. We'll see. Or then again maybe we won't. The light's outside the visible range."
Businesses

US IT Worker Files Hiring Lawsuit Against Infosys, Class Action Proposed 684

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the should-have-accepted-salary-in-beans dept.
itwbennett writes "Brenda Koehler is a VMware-certified professional network engineer with a master's degree in information systems and 17 years of experience. You might think that would qualify her for a lead VMware/Windows administrator, but Indian outsourcing firm Infosys apparently didn't. And Koehler has filed a lawsuit against the company, alleging that Infosys ignored her qualifications and eventually hired a Bangladeshi worker to staff a position she was qualified for. Koehler and her lawyers are asking the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin to allow a class-action lawsuit against Infosys, with 'thousands' of potential plaintiffs in the case, according to the lawsuit, filed Thursday."

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