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Submission + - Astrophysicists Identify The "Habitable" Regions Of The Entire Universe

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: It's not just star systems and galaxies that have habitable zones--regions where conditions are suitable for life to evolve. Astrophysicists have now identified the entire universe's habitable zones. Their approach starts by considering the radiation produced by gamma ray bursts in events such as the death of stars and the collisions between black holes and so on. Astrobiologists have long known that these events are capable of causing mass extinctions by stripping a planet of its ozone layer and exposing the surface to lethal levels of radiation. The likelihood of being hit depends on the density of stars, which is why the centre of galaxies are thought to be inhospitable to life. The new work focuses on the threat galaxies pose to each other, which turns out to be considerable when they are densely packed together. Astronomers know that the distribution of galaxies is a kind of web-like structure with dense knots of them connected by filaments interspersed with voids where galaxies are rare. The team says that life-friendly galaxies are most likely to exist in the low density regions of the universe in the voids and filaments of the cosmic web. The Milky Way is in one of these low density regions with Andromeda too far away to pose any threat. But conditions might not be so life friendly in our nearest knot of galaxies called the Virgo supercluster.

Submission + - The Raid-Proof Hosting Technology Behind 'The Pirate Bay'

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Ernesto reports at TorrentFreak that despite its massive presence the Pirate Bay doesn't have a giant server park but operates from the cloud, on virtual machines that can be quickly moved if needed. The site uses 21 “virtual machines” (VMs) hosted at different providers, up four machines from two years ago, in part due to the steady increase in traffic. Eight of the VM's are used for serving the web pages, searches take up another six machines, and the site’s database currently runs on two VMs. The remaining five virtual machines are used for load balancing, statistics, the proxy site on port 80, torrent storage and for the controller. In total the VMs use 182 GB of RAM and 94 CPU cores. The total storage capacity is 620 GB. One interesting aspect of The Pirate Bay is that all virtual machines are hosted with commercial cloud hosting providers, who have no clue that The Pirate Bay is among their customers. "Moving to the cloud lets TPB move from country to country, crossing borders seamlessly without downtime. All the servers don’t even have to be hosted with the same provider, or even on the same continent." All traffic goes through the load balancer, which masks what the other VMs are doing. This also means that none of the IP-addresses of the cloud hosting providers are publicly linked to TPB. For now, the most vulnerable spot appears to be the site’s domain. Just last year TPB burnt through five separate domain names due to takedown threats from registrars. But then again, this doesn’t appear to be much of a concern for TPB as the operators have dozens of alternative domain names standing by.

Submission + - Google's Doubleclick ad servers exposed millions of computers to malware (theverge.com)

Submitted by wabrandsma
wabrandsma writes: from The Verge:
Last night, researchers at Malwarebytes noticed strange behavior on sites like Last.fm, The Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post. Ads on the sites were being unusually aggressive, setting off anti-virus warnings and raising flags in a number of Malwarebytes systems. After some digging, researcher Jerome Segura realized the problem was coming from Google's DoubleClick ad servers and the popular Zedo ad agency. Together, they were serving up malicious ads designed to spread the recently identified Zemot malware. A Google representative has confirmed the breach, saying "our team is aware of this and has taken steps to shut this down."

Submission + - 'Reactive' Development Turns 2.0 (readwrite.com)

Submitted by electronic convict
electronic convict writes: First there was "agile" development. Now there's a new software movement—called 'reactive' development—that sets out principles for building resilient and failure-tolerant applications for cloud, mobile, multicore and Web-scale systems. ReadWrite's Matt Asay sat down with Jonas Bonér, the author of the Reactive Manifesto (just released in version 2.0), for a discussion of what, exactly, the reactive movement aims to fix in software development and how we get there from here.

Submission + - Intel Putting 3D Scanners in Consumer Tablets Next Year, Phones to Follow (gizmag.com) 1

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: Intel has been working on a 3D scanner small enough to fit in the bezel of even the thinnest tablets. The company aims to have the technology in tablets from 2015, with CEO Brian Krzanich telling the crowd at MakerCon in New York on Thursday that he hopes to put the technology in phones as well.

Submission + - Why Banana skins are slippery wins IgNobel (improbable.com)

Submitted by gbjbaanb
gbjbaanb writes: This year's Ig Nobel prize was won by Japanese researchers investigating why banana skins produced a frictionless surface compared to apple and orange peels.
(apparently "The polysaccharide follicular gels that give banana skins their slippery properties are also found in the membranes where our bones meet." so its not all fun and jollity)

Other prizes were awarded for noting that dogs only defecate when aligned with north-south magnetic fields, and that 'night owl' people are more likely to be psychopaths than early risers. Yes, that probably includes you.

Submission + - TrueCrypt gets a new life, new name (esecurityplanet.com)

Submitted by storagedude
storagedude writes: Amid ongoing security concerns, the popular open source encryption program TrueCrypt may have found new life under a new name, reports eSecurity Planet. Under the terms of the TrueCrypt license — which was a homemade open source license written by the authors themselves rather than a standard one — a forking of the code is allowed if references to TrueCrypt are removed from the code and the resulting application is not called TrueCrypt. Thus, CipherShed will be released under a standard open source license, with long-term ambitions to become a completely new product.

Submission + - The myths (and realities) of synthetic bioweapons (thebulletin.org)

Submitted by Lasrick
Lasrick writes: Three researchers from King's College, London, walk through the security threats posed by synthetic and do-it-yourself biology, assessing whether changes in technology and associated costs make it any easier for would-be terrorists to pursue biological weapons for high-consequence, mass- casualty attacks (and even whether they would want to). 'Those who have overemphasized the bioterrorism threat typically portray it as an imminent concern, with emphasis placed on high-consequence, mass-casualty attacks, performed with weapons of mass destruction (WMD). This is a myth with two dimensions.'

Submission + - Apple's 'Warrant Canary' Has Died

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: When Apple published its first Transparency Report on government activity in late 2013, the document contained an important footnote that stated: “Apple has never received an order under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. We would expect to challenge such an order if served on us.” Now Jeff John Roberts writes at Gigaom that Apple’s warrant canary has disappeared. A review of the company’s last two Transparency Reports, covering the second half of 2013 and the first six months of 2014, shows that the “canary” language is no longer there suggesting that Apple is now part of FISA or PRISM proceedings.

Warrant canaries are a tool used by companies and publishers to signify to their users that, so far, they have not been subject to a given type of law enforcement request such as a secret subpoena. If the canary disappears, then it is likely the situation has changed — and the company has been subject to such request. This may also give some insight into Apple's recent decision to rework its latest encryption in a way that makes it almost impossible for the company to turn over data from most iPhones or iPads to police.

Submission + - No, Google Isn't Going To Kill Its Nexus Devices (readwrite.com)

Submitted by electronic convict
electronic convict writes: Yes, Google is still planning Android Silver, an expensive and expansive plan to sell high-end phones made by Samsung, LG, Motorola and Sony to its specifications in carrier stores. But it is not going to kill off its Nexus line, as has been reported for months. Who says? Dave Burke, Google's head of Android engineering: 'People have been commenting about Nexus because there is something else and they think that means the end of Nexus. That is the totally wrong conclusion to make.'

Submission + - Before Beats: A Walk Through Apple's Digital Music History, 1977 to 2014 (readwrite.com)

Submitted by Dan Rowinski
Dan Rowinski writes: "By 1986, however, the Apple II had evolved into the 16-bit Apple IIgs (the “gs" stands for “graphics and sound”), a precociously audio-savvy machine featuring a wavetable music synthesizer—a first for personal computing at the time. The Apple IIgs commanded a loyal following all the way through 1992, when the Macintosh line took the Apple II’s baton."

Submission + - The Most Feasible Way to Colonize Space May Be to Print Humans on Other Planets

Submitted by Jason Koebler
Jason Koebler writes: Adam Steltzner, the lead engineer on the NASA JPL's Curiosity rover mission, believes that to send humans to distant planets, we may need to do one of two things: look for ways to game space-time—traveling through wormholes and whatnot—or rethink the fundamental idea of "ourselves."
"Our best bet for space exploration could be printing humans, organically, on another planet," said Steltzner.

Submission + - SpaceX to unveil manned Dragon Capsule. (universetoday.com)

Submitted by camperdave
camperdave writes: SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is set to unveil the Dragon V2 at a media event from Hawthorne, California, tonight at 7 pm. Pacific. The ‘Dragon V2’ is an upgraded, man rated version of the unmanned spaceship that has made several successful cargo trips to the International Space Station. The new craft will carry a mix of cargo and up to a seven crewmembers to the ISS. According to Musk, this is "Actual flight design hardware of crew Dragon, not a mockup,"

Following the space shuttle’s forced retirement in 2011, US astronauts have been totally dependent on the Russian Soyuz capsules for ferry rides to orbit and back. The crisis in Ukraine, which has resulted in some US economic sanctions imposed against Russia, also has the potential to threaten US access to the ISS as the Russian government considers reciprocal sanctions of its own.

“Sounds like this might be a good time to unveil the new Dragon Mk 2 spaceship that @SpaceX has been working on with @NASA.” Musk tweeted.

SpaceX is one of three commercial space companies competing for funding from NASA's Commercial Crew Transportation Capability program.

Anyone wishing to watch the unveiling can join the webcast at www.spacex.com/webcast at 7:00pm Pacific, 10:00pm Eastern.

Submission + - Try Programming This (Simulated) Quantum Computer (readwrite.com) 1

Submitted by electronic convict
electronic convict writes: Quantum computers (excepting—maybe—systems from D-Wave) remain largely inaccessible to most people who'd like to start thinking about how to actually use them. That's a big issue, since programming qubit based systems may be very different from coding on digital (binary) computers.

With that in mind, some Google engineers have put together an interesting quantum-computer simulator for general use. They describe their Quantum Computing Playground this way:

'Quantum Computing Playground is a browser-based WebGL Chrome Experiment. It features a GPU-accelerated quantum computer with a simple IDE interface, and its own scripting language with debugging and 3D quantum state visualization features. Quantum Computing Playground can efficiently simulate quantum registers up to 22 qubits, run Grover's and Shor's algorithms, and has a variety of quantum gates built into the scripting language itself.'

Coders, sound off: Does this give us a real glimpse at the future of computing?

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