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Submission + - What really happened on board Flight AF447 (popularmechanics.com)

Submitted by iB1
iB1 writes: On the 1st June 2009, Air France flight AF447 crashed into the sea with the loss of all 228 people on board.

Roughly two years later, the flight controllers were finally found, and the information used to piece together what happened on that fateful morning.

This is a report by Jeff Wise of the mistakes that the pilots made with transcripts taken from the flight records. It's surprisingly harrowing to read.
Security

Submission + - Adobe Zero Day Being Used Against Defense Contract (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: The newly discovered vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Acrobat that the company is planning to patch next week is being used to install a known Trojan that has been used in attacks against other Adobe vulnerabilities in the past. The exploit apparently has been used in targeted attacks against U.S. defense contractors, including Lockheed Martin.

Researchers who have analyzed the payload of the attacks against the zero-day in Adobe Reader and Acrobat said that the attacks are using the Sykipot Trojan as part of the payload in the attacks. When successful, the exploit will crash the Adobe application and then open a new document. In the sample analyzed by Brandon Dixon of 9bplus, the document was an employee survey that was targeted at employees of ManTech, a large defense contractor in the U.S.
Crime

Submission + - Cybercriminals Expand Repertoire of Tricks (net-security.org)

Submitted by Orome1
Orome1 writes: Cybercriminals are not averse to exploiting tragedies in order to spread malware. They create malicious websites with content connected in some way to the disaster and sent out letters making emotional requests for money to be transferred to the message sender in order to help those who have suffered. March also saw cybercriminals use Java exploits as a weapon of choice. Of the five exploits to appear in the Top 20 malicious programs on the Internet in March, three of them were for vulnerabilities in Java.
Google

Submission + - Google Helps The Insanely Popular Users (engadget.com)

Submitted by
StormDriver
StormDriver writes: "Do you think having 146 Facebook buddies is impressive? Snap out of it, saddo. Some Gmail users have thousands upon thousands of contacts in their list — so many, in fact, that they've been begging Google to increase its 10,000 limit. The Big G has now obliged these jabbering fiends, yanking the limit up to 25,000 and also boosting available cloud storage to 128KB per contact instead of 32KB. We imagine this could be of some help to business users perhaps, or those nice strangers who send out stock tips. But for the rest of us, the gesture is about as inconsequential as the professionally good-looking."

Submission + - ATT ADSL and broadband caps. I got it.

Submitted by ciscoguy01
ciscoguy01 writes: I just got the email from AT&T with subject:Updates to your AT&T Internet Terms of Service.
Among the nifty changes are the 150GB monthly usage cap starting May 2, 2011. There's even a web tool to track your usage.
I don't consider myself a big user, I don't subscribe to Netflix, for instance. But according to them I have used 73GB in 16 days. That's up and down. So I may be getting their notice of too much usage when this goes into effect.
I think this is way too low and I will be looking for another provider, though in my area there are only AT&T and Time Warner Cable, and CLEC DSLExtreme which has very cheap prices but unless you pay a lot you get a pretty inadequate throttled speed IMHO, just like AT&T.
This low limit and that they are charging us for uploads and downloads is going to limit a lot of their users internet activities. In today's world internet service is getting pretty close to becoming a public utility. I think it's essential.
With the telcos owning the copper wires all over town and there being no practical alternative, we are stuck with a few big, bad companies who are trying hard to keep us from getting what we want. What can be done? Should congress get involved? The FCC?
Google

Submission + - Citation map shows top science cities (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Which cities around the world produce not just the most but the best scientific papers? Using a database and Google Maps the answer is obvious.A paper in Physics arXiv describes how two researchers combined citation data with Google maps to create a plot showing how important cities around the world were in terms of their contribution to physics, chemistry or psychology.
NASA

Submission + - NASA Worker Falls To His Death On Launch Pad (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: Tragedy has struck NASA as the organization announced a space shuttle worker fell to his death at the Endeavour launch pad this morning.

NASA said the United Space Alliance worker fell at approximately 7:40 am eastern this morning at the NASA Kennedy Space Center's Launch Pad 39A.The launch pad is currently holding the space shuttle Endeavour, which is slated to launch in a month on April 19.
Google

Submission + - Microsoft, Google Sue Troll Who Sued 397 Companies (blogspot.com)

Submitted by FlorianMueller
FlorianMueller writes: Microsoft and Google have teamed up against a company that holds a geotagging patent and sued 397 companies last year in Texas, most of them in mid December. The list, published on Scribd and Crocodoc, includes plenty of household names. Now the two tech giants have entered the fray together and want the patent declared invalid and seek an injunction to prevent further lawsuits over it. Since the patent holder has already filed for an initial public offering, this intervention may come at just the right time to prevent the worst. Google and Microsoft say that there was prior art when the patent on an 'Internet organizer for accessing geographically and topically based information' was applied for in 1996.
Facebook

Submission + - Police To Crack Down On Facebook Bullies (eweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by
eweekeuropeuk
eweekeuropeuk writes: "Facebook bullies could get warning messages from the police, as the crackdown on cyber harassment begins

Police in Reading will start sending warning messages to Facebook bullies and their parents, in a bid to curb social network-related crimes among school students.

The Thames Valley police force will be working with teenage volunteers in identifying and tracking down Facebook bullies. Starting today, the aim of the scheme is to make cyber offenders aware of their illegal actions, and potentially threaten them with prosecution for a public order offence.

“While we want them to realise how serious the matter is, we also want to avoid that and keep young people out of the criminal justice system if possible,” said PC Dave Thomas of Thames Valley Police.

“By alerting their parents to the problem, we are aiming to nip the problem in the bud and prevent it becoming something more serious,” he added."
Music

Submission + - Indie Music the Real Killer for Major Labels? (queru.com) 1

Submitted by
Eugenia Loli
Eugenia Loli writes: "After Slashdot reported on the news that music execs now blame streaming for lost revenue, I did some digging about the state of the music industry. Except the known culprits (piracy, free streaming, lack of music and business innovation, financial crisis), I found that the rise of indie music in the mainstream might be more of a cause than previously thought. In the past few weeks, 80% of Rolling Stone magazine album reviews are about indie acts, while in the '90s there was only a single indie band that got reviews (Pavement), and in the beginning of the last decade there were just about 2-3 such reviews per year. But something clicked towards the second part of the decade, and especially after 2009, there's a surge in the press pushing consumers towards indie purchases. Maybe when RIAA complains to the Government about their failing revenue and asks for stricter laws, they should show a more complete picture of music sales, rather than the sales of just a few [ex-]major labels."
Space

Submission + - First underground cave photographed on the moon (wired.co.uk) 1

Submitted by Lanxon
Lanxon writes: High-resolution images have confirmed for the first time the presence of an underground cave on the moon's surface. Images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera reveal that what previously appeared to be a lunar pit in the Marius Hills region is in fact the entrance to a lava tube, with the cave floor visible through a collapsed ceiling, or "skylight".

Submission + - TSA roadside internal US checkpoints (bulktransporter.com) 2

Submitted by AHuxley
AHuxley writes: Inspectors from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will more involved in roadside inspections of commercial vehicles, according to TSA officials.
VIPR (Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response) started in the aviation sector and has now been expanded into surface transportation, bus terminals and train stations.
VIPR operations are conducted at weigh stations, rest areas with truck stop under consideration. Backscatter x-ray devices will be used on the trucks.

Submission + - Researchers Track Mouse Movements and Hesitations (jeffhuang.com) 2

Submitted by lpctstr
lpctstr writes: Researchers from the University of Washington and Microsoft Research have found that cursor movements and cursor hovers can detect the relevance of a search result and whether a user may abandon the search. They use an efficient algorithm written in Javascript to silently record movements and clicks on Bing and find that computing relevance using movements + clicks works better than just clicks (the current state-of-the-art). They explain some of this due to cursor and gaze being closely aligned on the web, and especially so on search result pages. Is this the future of innovation in search ranking — Google and Bing tracking your every twitch and pause?
Businesses

Journal Journal: We have no words to waste on you

Journal by countertrolling

When you reach out your vaunted strong hands for our palaces and purpled ease, we will show you what strength is. In roar of shell and shrapnel and in whine of machine-guns will our answer be couched.* We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces. The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain. As for the host of labor, it has been in the dirt since history began, and I read history aright. And in the dirt it shall remain so long as I

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