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Networking

Journal Journal: No IPv6 for UK broadband users

Journal by farnz
BT (the incumbent telephone company in the United Kingdom) are in the process of spending millions of pounds on upgrading their network to an all-IP core. However, they have failed to consider 21st Century protocol support, preferring to insist that IPv4 is enough for everyone. Haven't they noticed the IPv4 exhaustion report yet?
Space

Submission + - Unbelievably large telescopes on the Moon? (spacefellowship.com)

Submitted by
Matt_dk
Matt_dk writes: "A team of internationally renowned astronomers and opticians may have found a way to make "unbelievably large" telescopes on the Moon.

"It's so simple," says Ermanno F. Borra, physics professor at the Optics Laboratory of Laval University in Quebec, Canada. "Isaac Newton knew that any liquid, if put into a shallow container and set spinning, naturally assumes a parabolic shape, the same shape needed by a telescope mirror to bring starlight to a focus. This could be the key to making a giant lunar observatory.""
Mozilla

Submission + - Firefox 3.1 uses Skyhook to figure out location (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by rallymatte
rallymatte writes: According to an article on BBC's online Firefox 3.1 will include a new feature that will allow the browser to figure out your computers location from nearby wireless networks.
From the article:
The Geode project is an experimental add-on ahead of a full blown launch of geolocation technology in version 3.1 of Firefox.
Users will have control over how much location information they give.
Transportation

Submission + - Transparent Cockpit Removes Car Blind Spots

Submitted by
Ponca City, We love you
Ponca City, We love you writes: "Solid features such as dashboard and doors can conceal road hazards such as other vehicles and pedestrians but now engineers have come up with a way to make the car's solid features disappear from the driver's point of view. A pair of stereo cameras mounted on the passenger-side wing mirror capture scenery usually hidden from the driver by the dashboard and the solid parts of doors while a headset worn by the driver projects the cameras' output onto the solid features, displaying a clear view of what hides behind them as if they were transparent. "These sort of systems have been talked about for years, but this the best example of its kind that I've seen so far," says Andrew Parkes, who performs behavoural studies on drivers at the Transport Research Laboratory in the UK. Letting the driver see usually hidden hazards is better than alarm systems that can be hard to interpret, says Parkes, "but there's a long way to go before deciding whether it would be beneficial in practice.""
Spam

Submission + - Using e-mail spam as CAPTCHAS

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "With much recent talk about failure of CAPTCHA systems to keep out spammers (e.g., [1], [2]), I wonder whether it would be possible to turn the spammers' own devices against them. E-mail spam thrives by leaving so few clues that even the most finely tuned Bayesian filter cannot reliably detect and weed them all out; put another way, the spammers are able to create emails that *only a human* can discern as spam... So, why not compile spam that gets through the filters and find a way to use these spam as CAPTCHAS? For example, create CAPTCHAS that consist of asking a human to state what the subject of a certain spam message is (e.g., penis enlargement, debt consolidation, etc.). Pass the results of these efforts through some statistical tests to weed out poor responses (whether by human or machine). To amplify the effect, these very results of the CAPTCHA efforts could subsequently be used as input to spam filters. Hoist them on their own petard, as it were. Could it work? What does the Slashdot community think?"
The Internet

Submission + - Africa leads in IPv6 adoption (thestandard.com)

Submitted by
Ian Lamont
Ian Lamont writes: "The recent news that China will run out of IPv4 addresses in a few years points to slow adoption of IPv6 in some developed countries. Now it turns out that the largest number of networks displaying new IPv6 address blocks are registered through AfriNIC, which services networks in Africa and the Indian Ocean. While AfriNIC has a smaller installed base than other regions, many countries in Africa are showing rapid growth in terms of online connectivity."
The Gimp

Submission + - GIMP 2.6 Released

Submitted by
Enselic
Enselic writes: "The GIMP developers are proud to announce the release of GIMP 2.6. The release notes starts with:

GIMP 2.6 is an important release from a development point of view. It features changes to the user interface addressing some often received complaints, and a tentative integration of GEGL, the graph based image processing library that will eventually bring high bit-depth and non-destructive editing to GIMP.

and goes on with saying that the toolbox menubar has been removed, that the toolbox and docks now are utility windows, that it is now possible to pan beyond the image border, that the freehand select tool has been enhanced to support polygonal selections, and much more."

Space

Submission + - Do We Live in a Giant Cosmic Bubble? 1

Submitted by
Khemisty
Khemisty writes: "Earth may be trapped in an abnormal bubble of space-time that is particularly void of matter. Scientists say this condition could account for the apparent acceleration of the universe's expansion, for which dark energy currently is the leading explanation.

Until now, there has been no good way to choose between dark energy or the void explanation, but a new study outlines a potential test of the bubble scenario. If we were in an unusually sparse area of the universe, then things could look farther away than they really are and there would be no need to rely on dark energy as an explanation for certain astronomical observations. "If we lived in a very large under-density, then the space-time itself wouldn't be accelerating," said researcher Timothy Clifton of Oxford University in England. "It would just be that the observations, if interpreted in the usual way, would look like they were.""
Security

Submission + - Hackers clone Elvis' passport (pcpro.co.uk) 2

Submitted by
Barence
Barence writes: "Hackers have released source code that allows the "backup" of RFID-protected passports, although the tool can potentially be used to create fake or cloned documents. The Hacker's Choice, a non-commercial group of computer security experts, has released a video showing a cloned passport being approved by a security scanner at a Dutch airport. When the reader scans the passport it is revealed to belong to one Elvis Aaron Presley, complete with picture. Reports of the hackers serenading security staff with "Are You Clonesome Tonight" are unconfirmed."
Space

Submission + - A Star That Bursts, Blinks and Disappears (spacefellowship.com)

Submitted by
Matt_dk
Matt_dk writes: "Astronomers are reporting on a strange case where one of the littlest of stars "twinkled" with gamma rays, X-rays, and light — and then vanished.

The story began on June 6, 2007. That's when a spike of gamma-rays lasting less than five seconds washed over NASA's Swift satellite. But this high-energy flash wasn't a gamma-ray burst — the birth cry of a black hole far across the universe. It was something much closer to home."
Security

Submission + - Scientists can see through invisibility cloaks (networkworld.com)

Submitted by BobB-nw
BobB-nw writes: Much has been made in recent years of breakthroughs in creating "invisibility cloaks" along the lines of those dreamed up by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. Now comes word out of China that scientists there have found a way to seek through invisibility cloaks. Their efforts aren't so much to uncover objects or those who would be invisible, but rather to solve a problem with invisibility cloaks to date: a person inside such a cloak wouldn't be able to see out of it.
KDE

Submission + - KDE releases version 4.1.1 (kde.org)

Submitted by
silentcoder
silentcoder writes: "The KDE project announced the first major update to KDE4.1 today. Version 4.1.1's changelog is largely focussed on performance improvements and bugfixes. The desktop shell, plasma, had numerous improvements in this regard which should be the most immediately user-visible.

With each KDE4 release the project seems to be edging closer to true next-generation desktop that was promised and despite the initial 4.0 controversy is becoming ever more widely adoptable. The particular focus on performance improvements are especially telling of a renewed commitment to giving users what they want."
Google

Submission + - Google Chrome, the Google browser

Submitted by
Philipp Lenssen
Philipp Lenssen writes: "Google announced their very own browser project called Google Chrome — an announcement in the form of a comic book drawn by Scott McCloud, no less. Google say Google Chrome will be open source, include a new JavaScript virtual machine, include the Google Gears add-on by default, and put the tabs above the address bar (not below), among other things. I've also uploaded Google's comic book with all the details (details given from Google's perspective, anyway... let's see how this holds up). While Google provided the URL www.google.com/chrome there's nothing up there yet."
Internet Explorer

Submission + - SPAM: IE8's 'Porn Mode' Leaks Data

Submitted by
narramissic
narramissic writes: "The InPrivate Browsing feature built into the second beta version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 is designed to delete a user's browsing history and other personal data that is gathered and stored during regular browsing sessions. The feature is commonly referred to as 'porn mode' for its ability to hide which websites have been visited from nosy spouses or employers. To prevent login details, online orders and other sensitive information from leaking out, the privacy feature prevents the browser from storing any cookies and refrains from storing the browsing history in the Windows registry. But don't depend on it to keep your secrets safe. 'The privacy option in this beta is mainly cosmetic,' says forensic IT expert Christian Prickaerts."
Link to Original Source
Internet Explorer

Submission + - IE8's InPrivate not so private after all (pcadvisor.co.uk)

Submitted by
Brenno de Winter
Brenno de Winter writes: "Last week Microsoft allowed a bunch of journalist to take a look at the upcoming IE8-release. The preview of the just released-beta features InPrivate Browsing that is supposed to cover your tracks on the computer. But when I took it to the test for the Dutch website Webwereld there was unexpected harddisk activity. Together with a forensic investigator we observed what the software does. For anyone with some technical skills (Dutch) it is easy to retrieve someone's tracks. From the article: "Microsoft's main goal with InPrivate Browsing is to prevent other users of the same computer to gain access to the browsing history, the company said in an email response. The feature isn't designed to protect a user's privacy from security experts and forensic researchers, the company said." Privacy sometimes has its limits."

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