310163
submission
SilentChris writes:
Radiohead has announced that in 9 days they will be releasing their latest album through their website. The interesting part: you'll pay what you want. A physical version will be released in December for $82. No word yet on DRM, but given Radiohead's recent penchant for selling on MP3 sites, there's a good chance there won't be any. The best part: the record labels are completely uninvolved with this new venture.
309249
submission
paleshadows writes:
A year and a half has passed since
SubVirt, the first VMM (virtual machine monitor) based rootkit, was introduced.
The idea spawned two lively slashdot discussions:
the first, which followed
the initial report about SubVirt,
and
the second, which was conducted after
Joanna Rutkowska
has
recycled the idea (apparently without giving credit to the initial authors).
Conversely, in this year's HotOS workshop,
researchers from Stanford, CMU, VMware, and XenSource have published a paper titled
"
Compatibility Is Not Transparency: VMM Detection Myths and Realities"
which shows that VMM-based rootkits are actually easily detectable.
The introduction of the paper explains that
"While commodity VMMs conform to the PC architecture,
virtual implementations of this architecture differ
substantially from physical implementations. These differences
are not incidental: performance demands and
practical engineering limitations necessitate divergences
(sometimes radical ones) from native hardware, both in
semantics and performance. Consequently, we believe
the potential for preventing VMM detection under close
scrutiny is illusory — and fundamentally in conflict with
the technical limitations of virtualized platforms."
The paper concludes by saying that
"Perhaps the most concise argument against the utility
of VMBRs (VM-based rootkits) is: "Why bother?" VMBRs change the malware
defender's problem from a very difficult one (discovering
whether the trusted computing base of a system
has been compromised), to the much easier problem of
detecting a VMM."
300613
submission
Umbe writes:
Time-Nut and amateur time researcher Tom Van Baak (www.leapsecond.com) just took his family hiking, and verified Einstein's general theory of relativity along the way. "3 kids, 3 cesium clocks, a family road trip to measure relativistic time dilation".
209859
submission
Mitechsi writes:
Dell has struck a deal with Emerson to sell advanced cooling systems and services to data center owners. One type of supplemental cooling technology is called the Liebert XD. The XD consists of refrigerant-filled pipes that snake around the server racks in a data center. When the liquid refrigerant is in the pipes near the servers, it absorbs the heat coming off the computers, turns into a gas, and then gets pumped back to a cooling unit. The cooling unit then turns it back into a liquid for another. The liquid system cuts the cooling power load by about 30 percent to 50 percent as compared with other types of cooling systems.
149161
submission
walnutmon writes:
Sony is suffering a backlash from a recent publicity stunt that seems to have been in bad taste.
In a time of increasing public sensitivity to video game violence, Sony has gone to the extreme by publishing pictures from a party featuring topless cocktail waitresses and, get this: a freshly decapitated goat.
From the article:
The corpse of the decapitated animal was the centerpiece of a party to celebrate the launch of the God Of War II game for the company's PlayStation 2 console.
Guests at the event were even invited to reach inside the goat's still-warm carcass to eat offal from its stomach.
Sickening images of the party have appeared in the company's official PlayStation magazine — but after being contacted by The Mail on Sunday, Sony issued an apology for the gruesome stunt and promised to recall the entire print run.
Sony has been no stranger to bad press in recent years, between a rootkit scandal and countless corporate mishaps, this latest debacle just begs the question: When are they going to learn that there is such thing as bad press?
