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Earth

Search For Alien Life On 86 Planets Begins 248

Posted by samzenpus from the is-anybody-out-there dept.
liqs8143 writes "Astronomers from the United States have begun searching for alien life on 86 possible earth-like planets. A massive radio telescope that listens for signs of alien life is being used for this project. These 86 planets are short-listed from 1235 possible planets detected by NASA's Kepler telescope. The mission is part of the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, launched in the mid 1980s. A giant dish pointing towards each of the 86 planets will gather 24 hours of data, starting from this week."
Privacy

White House Releases Trusted Internet ID Plan 229

Posted by samzenpus from the I-feel-safer-already dept.
angry tapir writes "From the Computerworld article: 'the U.S. government will coordinate private-sector efforts to create trusted identification systems for the Internet, with the goal of giving consumers and businesses multiple options for authenticating identity online, according to a plan released by President Barack Obama's administration.'"
Safari

Safari/MacBook First To Fall At Pwn2Own 2011 492

Posted by samzenpus from the weakest-link dept.
recoiledsnake writes "A team of security researchers from the French pen-testing firm VUPEN successfully exploited a zero-day flaw in Apple's Safari browser to win this year's Pwn2Own hacker challenge. The hijacked machine was running a fully patched version of Mac OS X (64-bit). Bekrar's winning exploit did not even crash the browser after exploitation. Within five seconds of surfing to the rigged site, he successfully launched the calculator app and wrote a file on the disk without crashing the browser. Apple has just released Safari 5.0.4 and iOS 4.3 a few minutes before the Pwn2Own contest in an attempt to save face (a last minute patch for Chrome was also released) but failed."
Encryption

Sony Marketing Man Tweets PS3 Master Key 351

Posted by CmdrTaco from the social-hacking dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Sony Marketing Man, Kevin Butler's official Twitter feed retweets a post by @exiva that posts the PS3 Master key. Kevin Butler who has over 69,000 followers tweet read (The tweet now deleted): '@TheKevinButler Lemme guess... you sank my Battleship? RT @exiva: 46 DC EA D3 17 FE 45 D8 09 23 EB 97 E4 95 64 10 D4 CD B2 C2 Come at me, @TheKevinButler'" Here is a screenshot of the tweet.
Facebook

Facebook Private Info Increasingly Used In Court 270

Posted by CmdrTaco from the poking-for-fun-and-profit dept.
Orome1 writes "Making the content of your Facebook account private can thwart the social network's plan to share as much information as possible with advertisers, but may not keep out lawyers looking for material that will contradict your statements in a court of law. US lawyers have been trying to gain permission to access the private parts of social network accounts for a while now, but it seems that only lately they have begun to be successful in their attempts. And this turn of events is another perfectly good reason to think twice about what you post online."

Comment This is what I did (Score 1) 766

by thomasdn (#31242656) Attached to: Which Linux For Non-Techie Windows Users?

Both my mum, dad, sister, girlfriend, mother in law, girlfriends granddad(!) are using Ubuntu now. This is what I did.

First let them use Firefox and Thunderbird (if they use POP/IMAP mail) and maybe OpenOffice.org for some time. This will give them a hands on experience with alternatives to MS software. For most of the users the introduction to Firefox was a blast. They quickly noticed a much better web experience compared to Internet Explorer.

Then I offered them to try Ubuntu LTS. Installed it on a small partition on the disk, so they had dual boot. Then I told them to use Ubuntu for all their web surfing needs, etc. and only start up Windows, if they had to do something that would not work in Ubuntu. I also made them write down what didn't work, and we would look at it next time I visited.

Some of the users soon just stopped ever booting in to Windows.

So here is the status:
* mum: using Ubuntu LTS, but still has dual boot to Windows Vista because of a special application she needs at work.
* dad: only using Ubuntu LTS. I have had one support question about how to find imported pictures from a digital camera.
* sister: only using Ubuntu 9.10, but recently she needed a Windows application for school, so I installed Windows XP in VirtualBox. Apart from installing Win XP in Virtual Box, i have not had any support questions for over a year.
* girlfriend: only uses Ubuntu 9.10. I never have any support questions.
* mother in law: using Ubuntu LTS, I do not have any support questions. She primarily uses Firefox and OpenOffice. It Just Works for her.
* girlfriends granddad(!): Using Xubuntu LTS. Font size has been increased a bit from the default. I had one question about how to install a very old printer. Turns out the printer did not work on the computer (did not have parallel port), so he got a new printer.

Operating Systems

Nokia N900 Linux Smartphone Running OS X 251

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the mr-johnson's-dog dept.
Rovaani writes "There is a video floating around of a Nokia N900 smartphone running the full desktop Mac OS X 10.3. From the author, Tomi Nikkanen: 'I believe this makes the N900 the first smartphone ever to run a full version of Mac OS X (at any speed, slow or otherwise). As you can see from the heavily edited video, it took almost 2 hours to reach the "About my Mac..." window. Keep your eye on the time display as that will give you an impression of just how uselessly slow it is.'"

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