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Security

Submission + - Enigma machine still up for grabs (rhul.ac.uk) 1

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "Ever wanted to own your own piece of crypto history?

A genuine WWII Enigma machine, potentially worth thousands of US dollars, is up for grabs in a code-breaking competition associated with the book "Can you crack the Enigma code?" by author Richard Belfield (ISBN-10: 0752875264, ISBN-13: 9780752875262).

As part of the book, Richard worked with a team of experts from the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway, University of London to create a challenging collection of puzzles. These "Enigma puzzles" are designed to test even the most experienced puzzle addicts. The puzzles have been designed in such a way that ingenuity and lateral thinking will be as important as having access to a computer in solving them. The prize: a genuine Enigma machine, potentially worth thousands of pounds.

The competition has been running for over a year, and so far, it seems that the puzzles have defied even the most determined attempts to break them. There's been plenty of discussion on the on-line forum at http://enigma.isg.rhul.ac.uk/ but so far it seems that only the first three of the six puzzles have been cracked.

Time to sharpen your pencils and get to work..."
The Internet

Submission + - Internet Voting For America's Troops (electiontechnology.com)

Submitted by
Online Voting
Online Voting writes: "A pilot program from the Operation BRAVO Foundation is bringing Internet voting to a select group of Florida voters stationed abroad. The program intends to set up touch screen kiosks at three Air Force bases in the UK, Germany, and Japan. The project is expected to cost $700,000 and have up to 900 possible voters. Sponsors of the program have said it is a necessary step to ensure overseas voters have a chance to have their votes successfully counted and cite a recent U.S. Election Assistance Commission study which found half of all military and abroad attempting to vote did not have their ballot counted.

Another group attempting solve problems faced by overseas and military voters, the Overseas Vote Foundation, has launched its new Web 2.0 system to assist with voter registration. And not to be left out of the loop the U.S. government is planning to launch a complete online voter registration system in December."
Education

Submission + - Mayor of Birmingham, Al. Asks For OLPC Exception (al.com)

Submitted by
BhamGray
BhamGray writes: "Larry Langford, the new Mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, has asked the One Laptop Per Child organization to consider providing students in his City with laptops for the 2008 school year. The City of Birmingham would purchase the laptops through OLPC at a price of around $200 each. This would be a departure from the OLPC's "developing nations" target, but the organization's representatives are quoted in the article as having been persuaded by Mayor Langford to consider it."
Mozilla

Submission + - Firefox Memory Hogging Is Due to Fragmentation (pavlov.net)

Submitted by A beautiful mind
A beautiful mind writes: It has been long claimed by users that Firefox leaks memory, and on the other hand the developers claimed the number of leaks are minimal. It turns out both groups were right. Stuart Parmenter, one of the authors of the RAMBack extension started investigating and found out that the issue is memory fragmentation. He discovered that while loading about:blank uses 12,589,696 bytes of memory in the test he performed (image), after exercising Firefox with different websites and then clearing the caches with the help of the RAMBack extension the picture is wholly different: "Our heap is now 29,999,872 bytes! 16,118,072 of that is used (up 4,634,208 bytes from before... which caches am I forgetting to clear?). The rest, a whopping 13,881,800 bytes, is in free blocks!"
Announcements

Submission + - New 4-quark particle discovered in Japan (www.kek.jp)

Submitted by
mu22le
mu22le writes: "An international team of researchers at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba, Japan, the "Belle collaboration"*1, recently announced the discovery of an exotic new sub-atomic particle with non-zero electric charge. This particle, which the researchers have named the Z(4430)*2, does not fit into the usual scheme of "mesons", combinations of a quark*3and an antiquark that are held together by the force of the strong interaction.

The Z(4430) particle was found in the decay products of B-mesons (mesons containing a "bottom" quark) that are produced in large numbers at the KEKB "B-factory", an electron-positron collider at the KEK laboratory. While investigating various decays of the B meson in a data sample containing about 660 million pairs of B and anti-B mesons, the Belle team observed 120 B mesons that decay into a Z(4430) and a K-meson. The Z(4430) then instantly decays into a "Psi-prime" (Psi-prime) particle and a pi-meson (see Figure-1). The Belle team found that this particle has the same electric charge as the electron and a mass about 4.7 times that of the proton.

In the past few years, a number of peculiar new particles, including the so-called X(3872), Y(4260), X(3940), Y(3940), have been found by the Belle and also by the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). These new particles lie in the mass region from 4 to 4.5 times the proton mass, and decay into "J/psi" or "Psi-prime" particles and pi-mesons. Here J/psi and Psi-prime particles are examples of so-called "charmonium" mesons, bound states of a charm quark and its anti-particle (an anti-charm quark). Since the masses and the decay properties of these new particles do not match theoretical expectations for quark-antiquark combinations, theorists around the world have proposed other potential explanations, which include the possibility that some are made up of four quarks (for example, a combination of a charm quark, an anti-charm quark, an up quark and an anti-up quark). However, since all of these new particles are electrically neutral, it was not experimentally possible to rule out alternative explanations of the new states as excited charmonium mesons.

On the other hand, the newly discovered Z(4430) state has non-zero electric charge, a characteristic that clearly distinguishes this particle from normal quark-antiquark mesons; it, therefore, must have a charm quark, an anti-charm quark and at least two more quarks (for example, an up quark and an anti-down quark). Thus, the Z(4430) does not fit into the framework of known mesons. As a result it has attracted a considerable amount of attention from the world's physics community (Figures 2 and 3).

Single quarks cannot be isolated. Instead, quarks are confined in composite particles such as mesons. This is a characteristic feature of the strong force, described by a mathematical theory called "Quantum Chromo-Dynamics (QCD)". The discoveries of sub-atomic particles at the KEK B-factory provide an experimental foundation for better understanding of the phenomena of quark confinement as well as the formation of matter in QCD.

The discovery of the Z(4430) is described in a paper submitted on October 22 to Physical Review Letters, a leading physics research journal."
Social Networks

Submission + - Wikipedia's Fundamental Problems

Submitted by Moryath
Moryath writes: We all know Wikipedia isn't perfect — but can it be saved? Is it usable, or at the same time those who love it crow, why is it that more people are now leaving than entering? Why is it that the vast majority go by, perhaps contribute once, and quickly become like even Wikipedia's co-founder, utterly disillusioned? Why do former administrators come out and tell the problems themselves even when the "community" threatens them?

Or is it something more basic — is it that wikipedia's administrators are too powerful, and too willing to place an indefinite ban on anyone they choose, with no recourse? Is it impossible for new users to even come in and work, with edit-count-itis and entrenched cliques running the place into the ground?
Space

Submission + - Near Earth "Asteroid" Turns Out to be Spac 1

Submitted by iamlucky13
iamlucky13 writes: Last week, the IAU's Minor Planet Center asked professional astronomers around the world to help track a previously unknown asteroid, labeled 2007 VN84, that will pass the earth at the alarmingly close distance of 5600 km on November 13. However, Denis Denisenko of the Moscow Space Research Institute then noticed something peculiar: the object's trajectory exactly matched that of the European Space Agency's Rosetta probe, which will perform a gravitational slingshot around the earth on that date on its way to study and land on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The MPC's editorial notice on the error also comments critically on the current means available to identifying distant spacecraft such as Rosetta.
Software

Submission + - Linux software wiki - Come add software! (ribosi.com)

Submitted by
this213
this213 writes: "Linux software wiki open to the public, No account required to add and edit software.

There's very little software in it now. By my own efforts, this will continually grow. With some community involvement, this will change drastically. The only stipulation for software to be included is that it runs on Linux. This can be desktop applications, command line tools, cross-platform applications and even web scripts.

The main feature of this wiki is the ability for users to search a Windows application and see alternatives for Linux. So, someone searching a Windows alternative of "MS Word" might get a response of Abiword, OpenOffice.org and Kwrite."
Windows

Submission + - Claim - new machines will be linux proof. (whatreallyhappened.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: the new VISTA machines coming in next year are rumored to be set up to prevent people from installing alternate operating systems such as XP or, for that matter, LINUX.

(So — anyone have a theory how the DRM be set up to do this?)
Software

Submission + - What the Feick: The new Yahoo! Mail (appscout.com)

Submitted by
Brian H.
Brian H. writes: "We just gave the new incarnation of Yahoo! Mail an Editors' Choice, over at PC Mag. However, not all of the updates to the service have been completely positive. A reader, whose last name is Feick, wrote in to complain about the new spell-check which insists on changing his name to a similarly spelled, but largely work-inappropriate, four letter word."
Security

Submission + - The "embassy email hacker" questioned by p (www.idg.se)

Submitted by uffe_nordholm
uffe_nordholm writes: The "embassy email hacker" has been held for questioning by Swedish police. The article (http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.130629 , in Swedish) goes on to say that he has had several computers seized by the police, that Sweden has been under pressure from other countries and that D.E. himself should avoid traveling to various (unnamed) countries in the future.

For those that missed the 'original' story: D.E.(1) published a list of server names, login-IDs and passwords to 100 email accounts belonging (mostly) to embassies around the world. This created a bit of noise, and apparently Iran (!) is the only country to want to work with D.E. (after D.E. offered to help everybody concerned) in solving their security problems.

Personal comments about the current story:
Let me see if I get this right: D.E. sets up a computer and connects it to both internet and TOR. He keeps local copies of the traffic flowing through his computer. When people find out that their security is pathetically bad they get upset and apply pressure to bring D.E. to court? In what way are his actions "computer intrusion"? I grant that people using TOR might not like D.E. keeping copies of their traffic, but he is not the one putting the traffic on TOR in the first place!

(1): His official website is www.derangedsecurity.com, but it's contents seem to have vanished after the questioning by police. I checked the site only this morning, and there was the usual content.
Government

Submission + - Congress to pull Financial Aid for the RIAA (news.com)

Submitted by
malevolentjelly
malevolentjelly writes: "Several prominent members of the U.S. Congress are now pushing a bill where colleges stand to lose their Financial Aid if they do not participate with the RIAA's demands for student scalps. In a sterling example of corruption, they are even required to advertise alternative DRM-laden solutions to illegal p2p file-sharing:

The U.S. House of Representatives bill (PDF), which was introduced late Friday by top Democratic politicians, could give the movie and music industries a new revenue stream by pressuring schools into signing up for monthly subscription services such as Ruckus and Napster. Ruckus is advertising-supported, and Napster charges a monthly fee per student.


The prospect of losing a combined total of nearly $100 billion a year in federal financial aid, coupled with the possibility of overzealous copyright-bots limiting the sharing of legitimate content, has alarmed university officials.
"

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