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Submission + - Facebook quietly offers storage to developers (computerworld.com)

Submitted by

Lucas123

on Tuesday September 18, 2007 @01:45PM

Lucas123 writes: "Facebook has quietly started offering beta testers access to the latest version of a new storage service, according to Computerworld's Brian Fonseca. The wiki does warn users that the page is still in development and that users should make sure that data used in testing the service is properly backed up. Nick O'Neill, creator of the blogsite AllFacebook.com, said it would be "revolutionary" if the service is free."

Submission + - GPS Transitions to new Control System

Submitted by gsfprez on Tuesday September 18, 2007 @12:40PM

gsfprez writes: It took us a long time, but the Air Force has finally moved off of the 1970's mainframe GPS control system and is now running on a new Unix-based Control System called AEP — Architecture Evolution Plan (its not a very good name is it? /Zoot). Its important to remember that current GPS satellites are pretty Miss South Carolina as far as satellites go. They're bascially solar powered iPod shuffles with atomic clocks that simply playback whatever we upload into them at a precise rate. They don't actually have any idea where they are — its the control system here at Schriever that does. So, the benefits of a modern, easy-to-maintain control system are legion — especially to US taxpayers. First of all, we hire 20 & 30-somethings like me instead of having to hire TRON-somethings at 4 times the price to operate and mantain the systems because we've actually heard of Solaris (wtf is jovial?) and the storage devices we now use aren't just 60's b-movie sci-fi props. (Yes, the old system actually uses 9-tracks.) Also, the new system will be a lot cheaper to support and modify since Sun stocks things like SATA drives while diging up Saturday Night Fever-era DASDs isn't as simple as a trip to newegg.com. AEP will also allow us to be ahead of the curve: we're basically good to go to fly the new IIF birds. There's other goodness as well, like redundancy, yada, yada, but I like my job, and don't want to get fired because i said something i'm not supposed to.

Submission + - Study: Frequent cell phone use slows brain

Submitted by thefickler on Tuesday September 11, 2007 @04:03PM

thefickler writes: Frequent mobile phone users have demonstrated slowed brain function in a recent European-Australian study. The brain activity from frequent mobile phone users shows more slow activity (increased Delta and Theta) and a slowing of the Alpha Peak Frequency, interpreted as a general slowing of brain activity.

Submission + - Apple Blesses 3rd-Party iPhone Software - Sort Of (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by

StarKruzr

on Tuesday September 11, 2007 @03:03PM

StarKruzr writes: "Ars Technica is reporting that Apple's Greg Joswiak has said the company is officially taking a "neutral stance" on third-party binary applications for their mobile phone product. This means that while the iPhone community developers will get no help from Cupertino with respect to 3rd-party apps, Apple doesn't intend to do anything to prevent them from going nuts with whatever they want to write. Future Software Updates may break the hacks in one way or another, but it will be incidental rather than intentional. This is pretty great news for geeks who want a UNIX cell phone with a great interface. The iPhone software development community's progress has been accelerating rapidly, and this announcement can only mean that it will speed up even faster now that there is a measure of assurance from Apple that the phone will be "allowed" to be a platform rather than just a pretty device."

Submission + - BIND 8 EOL due to a security flaw discovered

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @01:12PM

An anonymous reader writes: PC-World reports that BIND 8, once the #1 DNS server on the Internet, and now still a popular DNS software, was demoted to "end-of-life" status following a discovery of a serious security flaw. The flaw, predictability of the DNS transaction IDs produced by BIND 8, was discovered by Trusteer's CTO, Amit Klein, and reported to BugTraq on the same time with ISC's EOL announcement

Submission + - HSBC U-Turn following facebook protest (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by ddrichardson on Thursday August 30, 2007 @06:01PM

ddrichardson writes: A facebook protest concerning HSBC's plan to charge graduate students interest on overdrafts has resulted in a u-turn by the bank, from the article:

A student campaign using the social networking website Facebook has forced an international bank into a U-turn over charges. HSBC is to abandon plans to scrap interest-free overdrafts for students leaving university this summer.

The HSBC bank said it was not too big to listen to its customers.

Submission + - Storm Hits Blogger Network

Submitted by ancientribe on Thursday August 30, 2007 @05:54PM

ancientribe writes: Researchers have discovered the Storm Trojan nestled in hundreds of blog sites in Google's Blogger network, according to an article in Dark Reading. And this isn't simple comment spam, but actual blogs that post spam, and now, Storm executable files. A researcher who's been tracking the Storm-infested blog sites says he's working with Google to clean up this latest appearance of Storm.

http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=132 793&WT.svl=news1_1

Submission + - Student and professor build budget supercomputer (calvin.edu)

Submitted by Luke on Thursday August 30, 2007 @05:21PM

Luke writes: This past winter Calvin College professor Joel Adams and then Calvin senior Tim Brom built Microwulf, a portable supercomputer with 26.25 gigaflops peak performance, cost less than $2,500 to construct, becoming the most cost-efficient supercomputer anywhere that Adams knows of. "It's small enough to check on an airplane or fit next to a desk," said Brom. Instead of a bunch of researchers having to share a single Beowulf cluster supercomputer, now each researcher can have their own. What would you do with a personal supercomputer?

Submission + - Internet growing too large for current hardware?

Submitted by

rkohutek

on Thursday August 30, 2007 @01:30PM

rkohutek writes: "There has been a very interesting discussion happening on the North American Network Operators Group (NANOG) mailling list about the scalability of today's Internet routers. A vast quantity of those routers support only 256,000 unique networks. According to the CIDR-Report, there are ~233,216 routes on the Internet, and at the current rate of 3,500 additional routes per month, we are going to be bumping into those hardware limits very quickly. Not many people are aware of the situation, and even fewer are prepared to perform the expensive upgrades. Has anybody already dealt with this and have solutions?"

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