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Science

Submission + - Aboriginal genome rewrites human migration theory (australiangeographic.com.au)

Submitted by bazzalunatic
bazzalunatic writes: A genetic study confirms that Aborigines were the first people to cross Asia out of Africa and arrive in Australia about 75,000 years ago. It also confirms that they are the oldest continuous culture in the world and branched off from Europeans in a separate wave out of Africa, rather migrating in a single wave.
IT

Submission + - NoSQL Gaining Ground on Old-Time RDBMSes (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "The relational database may never die, but its days of glory appear to be over, as IT organizations are increasingly turning to NoSQL and 'NewSQL' approaches over traditional RDBMSes, according to a report from InfoWorld. 'Relational databases, long a critical piece of enterprise software deployments, are now forced to share the stage with technologies better geared to accommodate newer data structures and modern hardware systems. Stalwart RDBMSes remain in place from software vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle, all of which will continue to dominate such core functions as financial transactions. But NoSQL databases, as well as big data technologies such as Apache Hadoop and MapReduce, are where the action is.'"
Cloud

Submission + - Man Jailed For Facebook Post About Thailand's King

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: 40-year-old Surapak Puchaisaeng, a computer programmer from Bangkok, Thailand, has been arrested on charges of insulting Thailand’s 83-year-old King Bhumibol Adulyadej on Facebook. Lawyer Lomrak Meemeuan said his client was accused of creating a Facebook profile with defamatory pictures, audio clips, and messages about the nation’s revered monarch.

Submission + - AIDS drugs for HIV viral antibodies LATEST: Found, (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: RESEARCHER America one step closer to developing a vaccine against the deadly AIDS virus. They found antibodies that can kill 91 percent of the HIV virus.
Scientists have found three powerful antibodies in the cell body of a male African-American gay 60-year-old, nicknamed Donor 45. Even one of them is the antibodies that neutralize more than 91 percent of the HIV virus. The male body naturally produces antibodies.
AMD

Submission + - AMD accidentally leaks 1.7 million DiRT 3 keys (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The free game with every graphics card deal has finally backfired for AMD and Codemasters. Due to a lack of .htaccess, 1.7 million keys for a free copy of DiRT 3 on Steam have been leaked. No word from AMD or Codemasters yet, but I'm sure Valve will block all the codes on Steam soon. One question that remains: if you used one of the codes will Steam ban your account? There could be a few very unhappy gamers later today if that happens.
Security

Submission + - The Hidden Security Risk of Geotags (nytimes.com)

Submitted by pickens
pickens writes: The NY Times reports that security experts and privacy advocates have begun warning consumers about the potential dangers of geotags, which are embedded in photos and videos taken with GPS-equipped smartphones and digital cameras. By looking at geotags of uploaded photos "you can easily find out where people live, what kind of things they have in their house and also when they are going to be away," says one security expert. Because the location data is not visible to the casual viewer, the concern is that many people may not realize it is there; and they could be compromising their privacy, if not their safety, when they post geotagged media online. "I'd say very few people know about geotag capabilities,” says Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, “and consent is sort of a slippery slope when the only way you can turn off the function on your smartphone is through an invisible menu that no one really knows about.”

Comment Re:What about RackSpace (Score 1) 3

by Oddscurity (#33101880) Attached to: Amazon EC2/S3 vs. traditional Webhosting?

The thing is that any comparison you can make without knowing the use case will simply be inaccurate. I'm sure that a regular webhost that charges a fixed amount for a decent bit of space and bandwidth will be the most economical up to a certain point. If beyond that a dedicated or virtual dedicated server is more interesting than the cloud offering, that depends on what kind of bandwidth is expected, how cpu and disk intensive this site is, and so on.

Simply put you're asking people to make a recommendation based on too little information. What's the use case? Expected number of page views per minute? Things like that matter.
The Internet

Submission + - BIND to remove DNS Neutrality (circleid.com)

Submitted by alphatel
alphatel writes: In a recent post, Paul Vixie, founder of ISC and author of MAPS (the original email RBL), has proposed a new method for BIND which "rates" domains. Opening with "Most new domain names are malicious", DNS queries would be sent to 'cooperating good guys' which can be used to filter out entire blocks of TLDs or country codes. In this new "Response Policy Zone" (DNS RPZ) method, all queries which fail to meet an unknown standard are redirected. As most people are familiar, elsewhere almost always winds up being the DNS host's advertising channel rather than the trash heap. Those fighting for net neutrality have denounced the change but ISC is already publishing a patch and would "like to hear from content providers who want to be listed by ISC as having reputation content available in this format, and also recursive DNS vendors whose platforms can subscribe to reputation feeds in this format. An online registry will follow."
Government

Submission + - Appelbaum detained at U.S. border, questioned abou (cnet.com)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: Appelbaum detained at U.S. border, questioned about Wikileaks

A security researcher involved with the Wikileaks Web site — Jacob Appelbaum, a Seattle-based programmer for the online privacy protection project called Tor — was detained by U.S. agents at the border for three hours and questioned about the controversial whistleblower project as he entered the country on Thursday to attend a hacker conference. He was also approached by two FBI agents at the Defcon conference after his presentation on Saturday afternoon about the Tor Project.

Appelbaum, a U.S. citizen, arrived at the Newark, New Jersey, airport from Holland flight Thursday morning, was taken into a room, frisked and his bag was searched.

Officials from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Army then told him he was not under arrest but was being detained. They asked questions about Wikileaks, asked for his opinions about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and asked where Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is, but he declined to comment without a lawyer present, according to the sources. He was not permitted to make a phone call, they said.

After about three hours, Appelbaum was given his laptop back but the agents kept his three mobile phones, sources said.

CNET News: http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20012253-245.html

Submission + - Verizon Changing Users Router Passwords 2

Submitted by
Kohenkatz
Kohenkatz writes: "I have Verizon FIOS at home and my Verizon-supplied Actiontec router had the password "password1" that the tech assigned to it when he set it up three years ago. I received an email from Verizon that said "we have identified that your router still had a password of either password1 or admin1 and we have changed it to your serial number." I checked and it actually had been changed. I believe this to be in response to the Black Hat presentation (http://it.slashdot.org/story/10/07/16/122259/Millions-of-Home-Routers-Are-Hackable) about the hackability of home routers. I am upset about this because Verizon should not have any way to get into my router and change the settings, especially because I own the router, not them! I looked in the router's settings and I see port 4567 goes to the router and is labeled "Verizon FIOS Service". Is this port for anything useful other than Verizon changing settings on my router? What security measures does Verizon have to protect that port from unauthorized access?"
Microsoft

Submission + - What Can Save Steve Ballmer? (conceivablytech.com)

Submitted by peterkern
peterkern writes: Is it just me or is there much more chatter about Steve Ballmer and reasons why he should quit? You typically read about the failed product launches, the Vista disaster and WP7, which is way too late. But there is another angle, which is quite interesting. Ballmer has never grown out of the shadow of Gates and was not able to create his own legacy. Perhaps it takes a rockstar to lead Microsoft and not just a monkey dance. It may be impossible to be CEO of Microsoft without transforming the company entirely. If you think about, you can already feel sorry for the one who will have to succeed Steve Jobs.
Games

Submission + - Wearing Multiple Hats, PR, And Success As An Indie

Submitted by x4000
x4000 writes: I've written a couple of new articles today targeted at new or aspiring indie developers.

The first about the challenges of wearing multiple hats as well as some PR-related stuff. Essentially, many indie developers seem to struggle with balancing the business side of their work with the game-development side of their work. I know I do, and this post breaks down some of why this might be, as well as reasons and goals for overcoming these challenges.

Case in point: by any objective measure, I really messed up the PR for the release of Tidalis. We had far too little PR, and now that awesome reviews are coming in it's still too late for the actual launch of the game. This has led to sales being about ten times lower than my minimum expectation for the game, even though the game has still been very successful compared to most indie games in its first two weeks. It certainly beats the pants off of what AI War did at first, and AI War went on to sell around 30,000 copies of itself and its expansion.

So what does that mean for Tidalis? Is it to be permanently harmed due to the lack of advanced press before initial release? Short answer: No. That certainly wasn't the case for AI War, and the reviews are even more positive for Tidalis than they were for AI War. Longer answer: I wrote a second article about the secrets of Arcen's success as an indie company, which outlines how we took AI War from a complete unknown to a cult classic. It's worked for us, I suspect this is what worked for Dwarf Fortress, and I know this is what worked for the likes of Doodle Jump and similar on the iPhone. And best of all, it's the sort of thing that big companies by and large would never do for their customers.

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