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Security

Submission + - China Reverse Engineered Classified NSA OS 2

Submitted by
Pickens
Pickens writes: "Seymour M. Hersh writes in the New Yorker that China has managed to reverse-engineered a Classified NSA operating system, estimated at between thirty and fifty million lines of computer code, giving China a road map for decrypting the US Navy’s classified intelligence and operational data. The story begins after an American EP-3E Aries II reconnaissance plane on an eavesdropping mission collided with a Chinese interceptor jet over the South China Sea in 2001 and landed at a Chinese F-8 fighter base on Hainan Island, the 24 member crew were unable to completely disable the plane’s equipment and software. Hersh writes that crew of the EP-3E managed to erase the hard drive—“zeroed it out”—but did not destroy the hardware, which left data retrievable: “No one took a hammer.” The Navy’s experts didn’t believe that China was capable of reverse-engineering the plane’s NSA-supplied operating system, but over the next few years the US intelligence community began to “read the tells” that China had gotten access to sensitive traffic and in early 2009, Admiral Timothy J. Keating, then the head of the Pacific Command, brought the issue to the new Obama Administration. "If China had reverse-engineered the EP-3E’s operating system, all such systems in the Navy would have to be replaced, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars," writes Hersch. "After much discussion, several current and former officials said, this was done.""
Science

Submission + - Stopping Malaria By Immunizing Bugs (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by RedEaredSlider
RedEaredSlider writes: Millions of people in the tropics suffer from malaria, a mosquito-borne disease that has been difficult to treat and which costs many developing countries millions of dollars per year in lost productivity. Up to now, efforts at controlling it have focused on attacking the parasites that cause it, keeping mosquitoes from biting, or killing the insects.

But at Johns Hopkins University, Rhoel Dinglasan, an entomologist and biologist, decided to try another tack: immunizing mosquitoes. ...

When a mosquito bites an infected human, it takes up some of the gametocytes.They aren't dangerous to people at that stage. Since plasmodium is vulnerable there, and that is the point that Dinglasan chose to attack.

A mosquito's gut has certain receptor molecules in it that the plasmodium can bind to. Dinglasan asked what would happen if the parasite couldn't "see" them, which would happen if another molecule, some antigen, were binding to those receptors.

Submission + - What alternatives to Net Nanny do slashdotters use

Submitted by goombah99
goombah99 writes: Net Nanny is the well known software to shield young children just getting started on the internet. But I figure that maybe computer savvy folks have other solutions or things that can be layered on top. If there was a list of naughty sites one could of course toss that in a Host file but, having tried that approach, those lists can be pretty long (and thus slow) despite being incomplete and they don't filter by content just IP. The other problem is that they are not per-user so mommy and daddy can't browse freely. I don't mind paying and don't require an open source solution. But I do need one for a mac osx computer. All this goes without saying that supervision and participation are important but you can monitor every key stroke and page load even when you are in the same room. Almost every google phrase you can think of has some close by salacious analog: My 5 year old like Ben 10, and I encourage him to use logic to form his own search phases, but there are some naughty Ben's in the world apparently. What do slashdotters do?
NASA

Submission + - How to Deflect an Asteroid with Today's Technology

Submitted by Matt_dk
Matt_dk writes: Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart is among an international group of people championing the need for the human race to prepare for what will certainly happen one day: an asteroid threat to Earth. Schweickart said the technology is available today to send a mission to an asteroid in an attempt to move it, or change its orbit so that an asteroid that threatens to hit Earth will pass by harmlessly. What would such a mission entail?

Submission + - Bell System Technical Journal online (bell-labs.com)

Submitted by pademelon
pademelon writes: Bell System Technical Journal is now online. This is the journal that published the invention of the transistor in 1947, Shannon's seminal paper inventing information theory, the invention of the CCD, of cellular communications networks, of MIMO communications, and much else in technology is now freely and easily available.

 
Microsoft

Submission + - Microsoft Releases Its Biggest-Ever Security Fix (foxnews.com)

Submitted by Velcroman1
Velcroman1 writes: Microsoft issued its biggest-ever security fix on Tuesday, including repairs to its ubiquitous Windows operating system and Internet browser for flaws that could let hackers take control of a PC. The new patches aim to fix a number of vulnerabilities including the notorious Stuxnet virus that attacked an Iranian nuclear power plant and other industrial control systems around the world.
Microsoft

Submission + - Researchers test WiFi access from moving vehicles (networkworld.com)

Submitted by Julie188
Julie188 writes: Researchers from Microsoft and the University of Massachusetts have been working on a technology that would let mobile phones and other 3G devices automatically switch to public WiFi even while the device is traveling in a vehicle. The technology is dubbed Wiffler and earlier this year its creators took it for a test drive with some interesting results. Although the researchers determined that a reliable public WiFi hotspot would be available to their test vehicles only 11% of the time, the Wiffler protocol was able to offload almost 50% of the data from 3G to WiFi.
Science

Submission + - Kiwi scientists make atomic 'breakthrough' (stuff.co.nz)

Submitted by Mogster
Mogster writes: "University of Otago scientists have made a "major physics breakthrough" with the development of a technique to consistently isolate and capture a fast-moving single atom. A team of four researchers from the university's physics department are believed to be the first to isolate and photograph the Rubidium 85 atom"

Good to see Kiwi's following in Rutherford's footsteps
Idle

Submission + - Resort Attracts Men with Virtual Girlfriends (discovery.com)

Submitted by disco_tracy
disco_tracy writes: Long a favorite of lovers and honeymooners, a Japanese beach town with fading sparkle has found a new tourism niche in the wired age. A resort based on a game called "Love Plus," encourages players to develop long-term relationships with virtual women.

Submission + - Flight Data Recorders, decades out of date (ieee.org)

Submitted by
Tisha_AH
Tisha_AH writes: "For the past fifty years the technology behind aircraft flight data recorders has remained stagnant. Some of the advances of cloud computing, mesh radio networks, real-time position reporting and satellite communications are held back by a combination of aircraft manufacturers, pilots unions and the slow gears of government bureaucracy. Many recent aircraft loss incidents remain unexplained with black boxes lost on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, buried under the wreckage of the World Trade Centers or with critical information suppressed by government secrecy or aircraft manufacturers.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/beyond-the-black-box/0

Many recorders still rely upon tape recorders for voice and data that only record a very small sampling of aircraft dynamics, flight and engine systems or crew behaviors. For many aircraft the recorders can only log a hour or two of data before overwriting the tape. All recording stops if the main electrical system fails and there is the ever present circuit breaker in the cockpit that can shut the system down.

Technologically simple solutions like battery backup, continual telemetry feeds by satellite and hundreds of I/O points, monitoring many systems should be within easy reach. An example of an extensive (but still primitive) recording system was during the loss of the NASA Columbia space shuttle. This vessel was equipped with a much larger assortment of monitoring points as it was used as a test-bed during shuttle development. Without the extensive forensic analysis of the telemetry data it would have been nearly impossible to reconstruct the accident in such detail. http://spaceflightnow.com/columbia/report/030826crew/

Pilots unions have objected to the collection and sharing of detailed accident data, citing privacy concerns of the flight crew. Accidents may be due to human errror, process problems or design flaws. Unless we can fully evaluate all factors involved in transportation accidents (aircraft, maritime, rail, transit) it will be difficult to improve the safety record. Recommendations by the NTSB to the FAA have gone unheeded for many years. http://www.policyarchive.org/handle/10207/bitstreams/3687.pdf

With all of the technological advancements that we work with in the IT field what sort of best practices could be brought forward in transit safety?"
Hardware

Submission + - Hacker creates 1/10th scale Cray-1 supercomputer (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Chris Fenton, an electrical engineer living in New York, always wanted his very own supercomputer, but did not have the space or money to acquire one. So he took a different approach and decided to build his own supercomputer from the 70s in scaled-down form based on the Cray-1.

The end result of his hacking produced a homebrew Cray-1A, which is 1/10th the size of the original. Unfortunately, getting software for the machine proved almost impossible. Fenton searched everywhere and eventually found out that SGI destroyed all the old software archives. Not even former Cray employees could help him.
Idle

Submission + - Twitter reveals secret Imperial documents (npr.org)

Submitted by djconrad
djconrad writes: Greg DiCostanzo's parody of the Wikileaks scandal is inspiring many to imagine the secrets the Empire does not want you to know. Many Bothans died to bring you this information.

Submission + - Very cool PC Bracelet from sony... 2

Submitted by gibbled
gibbled writes: In 2020 We Can Wear Sony Computers On Our Wrist

Our present need for internet connectivity is so profound that secondary devices like the Nextep Computer are bound to happen. Developed to be worn as a bracelet, this computer concept is constructed out of a flexible OLED touchscreen. Earmarked for the year 2020, features like a holographic projector (for screen), pull-out extra keyboard panels and social networking compatibility, make the concept plausible. Ten years from now is not too far away, so how many of you think we’d be buying such gadgets?

Designer: Hiromi Kiriki

Submission + - The Long-Term Impact of Developer Burnout (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister discusses how today's 'disposable geek' mentality toward developers is certain to hurt companies in the long run. The mentality — fast contributing to developer burnout, most visibly in the gaming industry — see some of the smartest and most highly specialized members of the workforce treated like disposable labor, easily replaced by newer, cheaper recruits. 'When workplace conditions become unbearable, the brightest and most talented employees are usually the first to leave,' McAllister writes. 'As a result, the overall competency of development teams tends to sink to the lowest common denominator. In other words, the more managers pressure their developers to perform beyond their limits, the less effective their teams become in the long run.' Worse, the resulting conditions give companies incentive to offshore work, exacerbating the effect. 'The lower the quality of the in-house development team, the more tempting it is to replace them with low-cost outsourced development. But the more in-house developers feel they can easily be replaced, the less invested they will be in their work, the company, or its goals.'"

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