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Earth

Submission + - Nuclear fallout could poison food supply (cosmosmagazine.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a potential nuclear conflict, fallout could contaminate fisheries and poison food supplies, according to formerly classified British military documents. Although the threat of global nuclear warfare has declined since the end of the Cold War, there is no reason, said science historians, that a regional conflict between countries such as India and Pakistan might not have similar effects.
Earth

Submission + - Infrared Fibers can Protect Against Chemoterrorism

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Although most Americans take the safety of their drinking water for granted, ordinary tap water can become contaminated within minutes, says Prof. Abraham Katzir of Tel Aviv University's School of Physics and Astronomy who has developed a fiberoptic system that can detect poisons such as pesticides in water in amounts well below the World Health Organization safety threshold using "colors" in the infrared spectrum which distinguish between pure and contaminated water. "With our naked eyes we can't distinguish between pure water and water that contains a small amount of alcohol or acetone. They're all clear," says Katzir. "But we can clearly distinguish between liquids using an infrared spectrometer which can distinguish between 'colors' in the invisible infrared spectrum." Connected to a commercial infrared spectrometer, the fibers serve as sensors that can detect and notify authorities immediately if a contaminant has entered a water reservoir, system, building or pipeline." Toxic materials are readily available as pesticides or herbicides in the agriculture industry, and can be harmful if consumed even in concentrations as low as few parts per million," says Katzir. Cities like New York are especially susceptible to a chemoterrorist threat. With many skyscrapers holding water reserves on the top of the building, a terrorist only needs to introduce poison into a tank to wreak havoc. "A terrorist wouldn't have to kill tens of thousands of people. Only 50 deaths — as horrible as that would be — would cause nationwide panic," says Katzir."
Intel

Submission + - Intel brings rich UI to Moblin Linux platform (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by 2mob
2mob writes: Intel's Linux-based Moblin operating system recently got a significant user interface overhaul. The platform's new graphical shell, which was unveiled Tuesday in a new Moblin 2 beta release, delivers top-notch usability and slick visual effects. The developers have completely reinvented the concept of virtual desktops and have replaced it with a more fluid "zone" system that makes it easier to organize how windows are grouped together. The shell also has tightly-integrated social network and messaging features, such as a built-in Twitter client and an instant messenger buddy list. Ars Technica tested Moblin beta 2 on Dell netbook and has published a comprehensive hands-on look at the new user interface.
It's funny. Laugh.

Submission + - West Point Maxes Security by Minning Windows.

Submitted by
twitter
twitter writes: "Line up, maggots! Uncle Sam is going to keep you away from Windows and honor code violations.

Colonel Joe Adams from the United States Military Academy at West Point has a solution [to your security problems] ... he said recruits at the New York academy line up in the corridors outside their rooms in their barracks every Saturday morning for a notebook inspection or "IT SAMI".

The college teaches Ada ("because you can't cheat at Ada"), C++, Python and Java, he said. And it standardised on FreeBSD: "We love it, it's the key to our success". Col Adams said the college uses Windows "as little as possible".

Did I hear you say Vista?! Drop and give me 20! #@$%!"

Java

Submission + - Sun to launch App Store for Java, and no one cares (javaworld.com) 1

Submitted by
jfruhlinger
jfruhlinger writes: "Yesterday Jonathan Schwartz announced on his blog Project Vector, which aims essentially to be an analogue to the iPhone's App Store — only for Java applications, on desktops. This could be huge for the millions of Java developers who'd be able to sell their apps directly to consumers, and for Sun (or, soon, Oracle) which will get a cut of every transaction. So why is it that nobody seems to care?"
Education

Submission + - Google CEO Urges Grads 'Turn off Your Computers' 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt told about 6,000 graduates at the University of Pennsylvania's commencement that they need to find out what is most important to them — by living analog for a while. "Turn off your computer. You're actually going to have to turn off your phone and discover all that is human around us," Schmidt said. "Nothing beats holding the hand of your grandchild as he walks his first steps." Schmidt also urged graduates not to lay out a rigid path for themselves. Rewards will gravitate to those who make mistakes and learn from them. "You can't plan innovation or inspiration, but you can be ready for it, and when you see it you can jump on it and you can make a difference." Schmidt added that members of his generation spent all their time trying to hide their most embarrassing moments while today's generation records and posts all those moments on YouTube, drawing laughter from the crowd. "And I am looking forward to watching these for the next 30 or 40 years.""
Medicine

Submission + - GP Drills into Skull with Home Drill to Save Boy

Submitted by ivi
ivi writes: From our Don't Try This at Home dep't: When a Victoria (Australia) country hospital had no medical drill strong enough to drill into the skull of a 13 year old boy, who'd fallen — helmetless — from his bike, causing internal bleeding in the head, he called down to maintenance for a home drill, wrapped it in sterile cloth, soaked the drill bit in antiseptic solution and drilled into the boy's skull to relieve the pressure caused by the bleeding. http://www.theage.com.au/national/handy-country-gp-saves-boy-with-home-drill-20090520-beg7.html
Security

Submission + - MacOS X users vulnerable to major Java flaw

Submitted by FruitWorm
FruitWorm writes: Security researchers found that MacOS X users are vulnerable to a critical, 6 months old, remote vulnerability in Java, a component that is enabled by default in Web browsers on this platform.
Julien Tinnes notes that this vulnerability differs from typical Java security flaws in that it is "a pure Java vulnerability" and doesn't involve any native code.
It affected not only Sun's Java but other implementations such as OpenJDK as well on multiple platforms, including Linux and Windows. "This means you can write a 100% reliable exploit in pure Java. This exploit will work on all the platforms, all the architectures and all the browsers" Julien wrote.
Apparently, this bug had been demonstrated during the Pwn2own security challenge this year at CanSecWest, although the details were not made public at that time. MacOS X users are recommended to disable Java in their browsers while Apple is working on a security update.
Graphics

A History of 3D Cards From Voodoo To GeForce 320

Posted by kdawson from the long-and-winding-road dept.
Ant sends us to Maximum PC for an account of the history and current state of 3D video cards (single print page). "Try to imagine where 3D gaming would be today if not for the graphics processing unit, or GPU. Without it, you wouldn't be [trudging] through the jungles of Crysis in all its visual splendor, nor would you be fending off endless hordes of fast-moving zombies at high resolutions. For that to happen, it takes a highly specialized chip designed for parallel processing to pull off the kinds of games you see today... Going forward, GPU makers will try to extend the reliance on videocards to also include physics processing, video encoding/decoding, and other tasks that [were] once handled by the CPU. It's pretty amazing when you think about how far graphics technology has come. To help you do that, we're going to take a look back at every major GPU release since the infancy of 3D graphics. Join us as we travel back in time and relive releases like 3dfx's Voodoo3 and S3's ViRGE lineup. This is one nostalgic ride you don't want to miss!"
Government

Submission + - Intel Penalty Says More Tech Blood On The Street (bnet.com)

Submitted by
eweekhickins
eweekhickins writes: "The public wants heads to roll on both sides of the Atlantic, and the EU's record $1.45 billion fine of Intel is the signal that this is exactly what's going to happen. It's not like they're not warning us — statements by the DOJ, SEC, FTC and good old Neelie Kroes herself are unambiguous: if you're not clean, we're coming at you hard."
Security

Submission + - DNS Hijacking

Submitted by Interruptor
Interruptor writes: Hi folks, I noticed when i went to the website 'rtlz.nl', please note the abscence of the preface 'www.', that i was redirected to a site on 'sedoparking.com'. When i repeated the URL i was sometimes (but not all the time) redirected to this page. Sometimes i was redirected to www.rtlz.nl, which is correct. After manually entering the 'sedoparking.com' url in the browser, redirection did not occur again. I do not seem to have any spyware/addware/virus on my system.....so it probably means that there is a DNS server that has some sort of hijacking script in place, that deverts you 'once in a while' to 'sedoparking.com' instead of to the right URL (if www. is omitted from the url)..... Any others with this experience, or any thoughts on this ?? I never ever had this before, just the last 2 days....
Software

Submission + - AdBlock Plus vs NoScripts, when addins declare war (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: It seems the author of NoScript declared war on AdBlock Plus for blocking his advertisements. The war escalated until Giorgio Maone the author of NoScript deliberately added code into NoScript which disrupted the operation of AdBlock Plus. NoScripts users reaction was "severe." The Mozilla Foundation has stepped in proposing a new policy for guidlines and asked for community comment. Maone, meanwhile, has apologized and removed the code disrupting AdBlock Plus. The first part of this saga has been discussed here before.

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