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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 121 declined, 48 accepted (169 total, 28.40% accepted)

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Idle

Submission + - Man takes up internal farming (bbc.co.uk) 1

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: I had to laugh when I saw this going past on the teletext this morning :

A Massachusetts man who was rushed to hospital with a collapsed lung came home with an unusual diagnosis: a pea plant was growing in his lung.

Just that summary should tell you enough to work out most of the rest of the details, but it does raise a number of questions unaddressed by the article — how did the pea roots deal with the patient's immune system (or did they? ; what would have happened if the situation had continued un-treated (was the seedling getting enough water and gravitational information to continue trying to grow up the bronchi )? [LAUGHS] I bet the guy has a career awaiting him in "P"R for a pea-growing company.

Earth

Submission + - Strange extra-solar planet atmosphere (nature.com)

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: Reported in today's number of Nature is an odd chemical disequilibrium in the atmosphere of an extra-solar planet, GJ 436b.

Fine spectroscopic work from orbiting telescopes reveals some infra-red signatures of the atmosphere, and to the surprise of the authors, something is missing. The composition should reveal substantial quantities of methane, but it's not there. The methane levels are between 7000 and 100000 times lower than they should be, assuming a Sun-like composition, and the temperature and pressure conditions of the planet.

The authors speculate that this chemical disequilibrium is because of the tidal-lock between the star and the planet (meaning that the planet has a 'hot' side and a 'cold' side). Which is moderately interesting in itself. But more importantly, detection of such chemical characteristics in the atmosphere of a planet is one of the few tools we have for detecting the presence of life from a distance. So this is a valuable proof-of-concept that we could detect life in our galaxy from our current location with our present technologies.
NASA

Submission + - High as a Rocket Man ?? (nasa.gov)

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: Many SlashDotters of a "certain" generation will remember the Elton John lyrics :

Zero hour nine a.m.
And I'm gonna be high as a kite by then"
('Rocket Man', Elton John & Bernie Taupin)

Obviously someone at Cape Canevaral (or is it Kennedy?) likes the idea. A newsletter sent out on Jan 14th by the Kennedy Space Centre declares :

NASA Investigates Illegal Substance Found in Shuttle Hangar CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA has launched an extensive investigation after a small amount of cocaine was found in a restricted area of the processing hangar for shuttle Discovery at Kennedy Space Center, Fla.

I'm sure a number of Slashdotters will have received the mailshot, but I can't find the press release online yet. The press release is referenced as "RELEASE: 01-10" from "Allard Beutel", but for some reason it's not online with the rest of their press releases. "Toot, toot" said Fat Freddy

Linux

Submission + - Penguin Picture Of The Day (antarctica.ac.uk)

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: The astronomers have their APOD-Astronomy Picture Of The Day, my fellow Earth Scientists have our EPOD-Earth Picture Of The Day (currently thinking about the wrong planet, but WTF?), New Scientists have their own NSPOD-NewScientist Picture Of The Day, and even Lunatics can have their LPOD-Lunar Picture Of The Day.
But what's a poor penguin-botherer got to look forward to in the cold light of morning, apart from a bucket of lukewarm, slightly stale herring and explaining everything to the neighbours? PPOD!, that's what ; the Penguin Picture Of The Day, brought to you by those seriously cool froods at the British Antarctic Survey.
Earth

Submission + - A good, or bad, month in Ebola research

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: Ebola is a nasty, scary virus.
Needle-stick injuries are scary on general principles.
Needle-stick injuries with a needle that you know you've just used for handling Ebola is a bit more than slightly scary.
Being an active researcher on one of the nastier virii out there ... well, that's going to make you sleep easier after your needle-stick injury, isn't it?

That's a down side. On the upside, AP are reporting (via Yahoo) that rapid action to treat the injured medical researcher with an experimental vaccine seems to have been successful. The 21-day incubation period of this really nasty virus hasn't passed yet, but the researcher (as yet un-named) is past the peak period for expression of infection.
Whether this unanticipated early test of the vaccine will move the availability of bulk vaccine forwards is too early too say, but one can hope.
Have a read of the "bleeding out" descriptions in "The Hot Zone" (ISBN: 0385427107) if you want a little light bedtime reading.
Security

Submission + - Police hunt 'radioactive teacher'

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: The BBC are reporting an arrest warrant issued for a person who has gone on the run during cancer treatment. [The judge] who issued a warrant for his arrest, said: "Please warn officers that when he is arrested he might be radioactive. This is not a joke."

While being basically a "accused on the run" story and thus not particularly interesting, the fact that the accused has been seen boarding a ferry out of the country begs the question of how many tonnes of radioactive material for dirty nuke WMD manufacture have been brought in, undetected, through the same route? Or is it just technical incompetence in judge, police, and reporters, again?
Media

Submission + - Nobel jurors alleged open to bribery on trips

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: A report is circulating that in the run-up to the selection of prize-winners for 2006 and 2008, some members of the Nobel jury accepted an expenses-paid trip (or trips) to China to "explain the selection process". While that's not in itself a lynching matter ("Is there something that we're doing wrongly, or not doing?" is a valid question), and if there was dishonourable intent, it doesn't seem to have worked too well (the last Chinese Nobel Laureate was in 1957), there does seem to be embarrassment about falling into an obvious conflict of interest mantrap.
Security

Submission + - ID-theft story conceals racist core

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: Following up the recent SlashDot story on Bruce Schneier's new hash function, I found a "Horrible Identity Theft Story" on Schneier's blog. The story retells a quite horrible tale of bad design of a security system, which in itself is all well and bad. But the final blame for the failures are put on the design of the outsourced security system, despite the outsourced security staff not being given the tools they need to do the job because of explicit racism inside the bank's operations team.
To quote the article : "The problem with the Philippine security department quickly became apparent. The US security department had access to LexisNexis. If you're not familiar with it, it's basically a encyclopedia of everybody's life." But the article then goes on to berate the Philippines security as being unable to do their job when they're not given the same tools as their American counterparts : "Chase didn't trust the Philippine department to have it [LexisNexis] though. In fact, the only information they had the ability to verify was what was on the account: name, social security number, mother's maiden name, and recent purchases if they felt like being that diligent."
So, what is presented as a security problem, is in fact, a problem of racism within "Chase", who consider Philippinos to be inherently less trustworthy than US employees in a revolving door employment situation. I'd be more inclined to have confidence in a person in a locally prestigious job to one in "revolving door" employment. How many of the American "trusted few", for example, are fluent in two (or more) languages? — but almost all of the berated Philippinos are ; that speaks of significantly higher educational attainment, social position, and therefore more to lose from breaking security rules.
Communications

Submission + - India developing "Spoken Web"

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: This week's New Scientist (abstract only for non-subscribers, or get the paper version at your newsagent) reports that in a response to the low literacy of the population of India (around 70% are still essentially near-subsistence farmers), various groups are coming together to develop speech recognition and speech storage technologies to link mobile phones into a WWWeb-like mash-up. IBM India Research Labs are one of the cited companies, with technologies such as Voigen and VoiceSite. Plus, of course, we've already got VoiceSpam, so the essential toolkits are there.
Security

Submission + - RIM (of Blackberry fame) spurns Indian spy call (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: The BBC are reporting that
"The Canadian manufacturer of Blackberry mobile phones has rejected demands by the Indian government that it help decrypt suspicious text messages.
Research in Motion says its technology does not allow any third party — even the company itself — to read information sent over its network. "

The article is light on technical details (like, exactly who is wanting to read whose messages? ; or, what encryption systems do Blackberries use?), but the implication of a very blunt statement like that is that RIM have done what they consider a fairly clean implementation of xGPx, or something similar.
Mozilla

Submission + - More Antarctic dinosaurs 2

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: The highly respected palaeontology journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica has published its December number for free access on the web, with the headline paper concerning new discoveries of dinosaurs from Antarctica.

The first major part of these discoveries were made as isolated bones of a sauropod (a relative of the well-known Brontosaurus) which were associated with a theropod (ancestor or cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex). These specimens were discovered at an altitude of 4100m, above the Beardmore Glacier in the TransAntarctic Mountains in 1991. Further field work during the following 13 years produced more material, seemingly from the same specimens and allowed more accurate description of the sauropod and it's naming as Glacialisaurus hammeri (the reason for the genus name is obvious ; Professor Hammer lead the field expeditions under "extremely difficult conditions"). The herbivore was some 25ft long and weighed-in at 4~6 tonnes ; at the time of life, the area was between 55 and 65 degrees south, suggesting a climate similar to the Falkland Islands or Tierra del Fuego.

The popular conception of dinosaurs as slow-moving, cold-blooded animals has long been challenged by such finds of high-latitude dinosaurs. One would expect the mainstream news sites (Slashdot included) to pick up on this publication as further evidence that the dinosaurs were much more diverse than that. After all, the only significant land animals in present-day Antarctica are penguins ; penguins are birds ; birds are dinosaurs (for any meaningful use of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs") ; so one could make a good case that Antarctica IS the continent which has been dominated by dinosaurs for the last 200 million years. Quoth the penguin : "we don't need no steenkin' furry Mammalia on this here continent!"
However, since Antarctica is probably the most Linux-laden continent on the planet, and Antarctica is also the "dinosaur continent" (as I've just argued), then some FUD-merchant is going to make the false deduction that this means Linux is a dinosaur, instead of the correct deduction that dinosaurs are really well adapted to their extreme environments.

For the editors : Why is this under Topic:Mozilla? Because it's the closest match available in the list of topics — theropod and all that jazz.
Supercomputing

Submission + - The largest (distributed) supercomputer ...

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: Peter Gutmann at Auckland, New Zealand has made some estimates about what is probably the world's largest (distributed) supercomputer. Details are somewhat shady, not because of the secrecy habits of the spooks, or a government's desire to surveil it's citizens. No, the people who've built this (distributed) supercomputer are shadowy because they're simply criminals. The continuing Storm Worm botnet now seems to contain between 1 and 10 million computers, and with a broad-brush estimate of the likely machines involved he comes up with a description of a system that dwarfs all the largest publicly-described supercomputers of the world. I have my suspicions that the estimated "average" computer specification considered is somewhat over-the-top (I'd have to weld together at least two of the machines in my flat to even approach this specification, and I'd have to weld together at least 4 of the best video card in the house), but with an 8-fold difference in processor count between StormWorm and BlueGene/L , there's a lot of room for Gutmann to be both correct and on the low side in his estimates.
With a system like this, is it credible that they (the criminals running this system) are planning for example, to try breaking SSL-encrypted communications in real time?
Security

Submission + - Secure servers - NOT

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: A salutary reminder of the ineffectiveness of firewalls and Bastille-hardened routers against some forms of computer crime : a forensic computing analysis company in Britain had a server full of case records and data for anti-terrorism cases. It was stolen. Physically stolen.

The article goes on to make a number of points about the actual level of security in the computer forensics business in the UK, which wouldn't really surprise anyone. But that they can lose a server is a good reminder to make sure of one's physical security as well as one's electronic security. Recent Slashdot stories have covered employees picking up virus-laden USB sticks in car parks, and a multitude of laptop thefts, as well as the weaknesses of some lock designs against picking. Is this story making an argument that ALL sensitive data should be stored under encryption, not just what goes onto laptops.
Sun Microsystems

Submission + - Sun comparing ZFS and EXT3 2

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: Sun have been sending out links to a whitepaper comparing their ZFS file system with the more widely-distributed EXT3 file system. Bearing in mind the source (Sun), they find that

  • Solaris ZFS outperforms the ext3 file system in tests that represent the storage and data requests typically made by database, mail server, and Web applications.
  • The various ext3 file system mount options available require making a trade-off between data integrity and performance — creating implications for environments in which continuous access to data is critical. Such trade-offs are not necessary in Solaris ZFS.
Sun are touting particularly that ZFS can be administered more simply than other filesystems, not requiring significant downtime for operations such as formatting a new volume and integrating it into a storage pool, and automating operations that could threaten data integrity. (I am not a Sun person, and can't vouch one way or the other for the relevance of the results cited.)
Announcements

Submission + - Foot & Mouth Disease in Britain ... again

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: Six years after the previous outbreak, Britain has another confirmed case of Foot and Mouth Disease. Reporting is on the BBC with details of the restricted area on DEFRA's website (the relevant government body), including a map of the area closed.

Does this affect Slashdotters?

Probably not a lot while it's still just the one farm. Unless of course, you were planning on going out caving this weekend — any sort of outdoor activity is likely to be pretty unpopular for the next few days. Visitors to Britain are likely to be having the Customs people descending on meat products like the proverbial ton of bricks from a great height. And if it spreads in the next week ... well it's just going to be hell. Again.

Plus, of course, many of the troops who worked so hard to control the last outbreak, are wasting their time in fighting for Dubya's next oilwell. So they're going to be unavailable.

Last time round the ultimate source was thought to be illegally imported meat from India ; who knows what the source was this time, and where else it could appear next.

Here is some cheerful reading : a list of the recent outbreaks of farm diseases, including FMD in Ecuador (21 June), Kyrgyzstan (8 June), Turkey (12 April) ... and the list goes on.

Oh well, I guess it's the art gallery this weekend, instead of a nice grope around in the cold dark mud. [SIGH]

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