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Submission + - Brits to be forced on to IPv6? (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP
00_NOP writes: The British government today outlined its legislative programme for the year ahead. Gone was a plan for a "snoopers' charter" that would have mandated all internet communications being logged for the benefit of law enforcers and in was a plan to match connections to IP addresses in some (unspecified) way. Surely the only way to do this is via IPv6 and noone is mad enough to enforce a transition to IPv6 by law, are they?!

Submission + - How common is malicious code in Wordpress themes and widgets? (rawcell.com)

Submitted by Cypher, Lou
Cypher, Lou writes: I ran afoul of the recent "social-media-widget" plugin malicious code and after googling around looking for a fix I found more reports not just of widgets but even themes Malicious Theme
It was my understanding, or maybe silly assumption, that in order to submit a theme or a widget to Wordpress there was a code review process.
Is this getting what you pay for or is it reasonable to expect that free software should not contain little surprises that hijack your website to feed objectionable material or is it buyer beware?

Submission + - Thousands protesters in Beijing street, Chinese media and websites in lockdown

Submitted by centralcommittee
centralcommittee writes: Thousands of people, mostly migrant workers from Anhui province, held protest today (5/8/2013) on the 2nd Ring Road of Beijing, south of Temple of Heaven. The protest is in response to Beijing police's mishandling of the death of a girl from Anhui province, who was alleged to be gang-raped by shopping mall security guards and fell to her death last Friday. The government has deployed hundreds of police plus helicopters against the protesters, traffic near the protest site was blocked for miles. Currently the name of the shopping mall "Jingwen" has become a restricted word in major Chinese websites, user cannot post anything containing this word. The Chinese search engine Baidu also refuses to display any result for this word while Google returns more than 800,000 results for this word.

Submission + - British press fulminate over "big brother" technology

Submitted by 00_NOP
00_NOP writes: One of Britain's biggest selling newspapers, the Mail on Sunday, today launches into what it calls the "sinister" idea that refrigerators should be fitted with technology — such as that promoted by Dynamic Demand — which would automatically switch devices off for a few seconds if the UK's unified National Grid showed signs of severe overloading (such as those seen commercial breaks in big TV events when tea-loving Brits rush to switch their kettles on). The claim that this is "Big Brother" technology surely does not stand up to examination, but the Mail On Sunday and its sister Daily Mail already have an unenviable reputation as highly effective anti-science publications.

Submission + - Schrödinger's cat: how difficult is that to stage? (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP
00_NOP writes: If you know anything about quantum mechanics you'll almost certainly have heard of "Schrödinger’s cat" but will also regard it as little more than a thought experiment to demonstrate the strage ways in which quantum uncertainty shapes physics and measurement. But at the heart of quantum theory is the claim that all objects, of unlimited size, can demonstrate the "superimposition" the experiment describes (in this case the cat is both alive and prowling about and dead at the same time) and physicists have indeed been able to superimpose ever larger objects. Now two German physicists, Klaus Hornberger and Stefan Nimmrichter of the University of Duisberg-Essen, have proposed a logarthmic index for the scale of successful superimposition experiments. We've advanced by about six or seven orders of magnitude since the first superimposition experiments, but would have to get through another 45 OMs to have an undead cat, it seems. Could happen though?

Submission + - British security service hacks into unsaved documents (mi5.gov.uk)

Submitted by 00_NOP
00_NOP writes: The British domestic security service, MI5, has successfully contributed to the conviction of three would-be terrorists by recovering portions of documents the three had thought were unsaved. The three discussed possible terrorist targets by typing into a laptop but did not save the document. Yet MI5 were able to recover substantial portions of the document which was used as evidence. But why didn't MI5 use a Unicode capable hex editor?

Submission + - Why more men should be spending time in the gym (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP
00_NOP writes: The scientific results are in and a paper published by the US National Academy of Sciences reports it is true that women really do prefer men with larger penises. There are a couple of compensations for those with penises on the smaller size: that tallness is around as attractive as a large penis and if you are neither tall nor have a large penis then getting ripped — or having broad shoulders and slim hips naturally — also helps.
I just hope this doesn't give the spammers more energy!
Twitter

Submission + - Hashtag war has begun in British House of Commons (wordpress.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Today is a big day in Britain — the annual Budget (actually the government's tax plans rather than spending) was announced in the House of Commons in a televised debate.

The leader of the opposition Labour Party, Ed Miliband, used his televised reply to suggest tweeters used the hashtag #downgradedChancellor in their responses and within the hour this was trending worldwide. Seems the Parliamentarty Twitter Wars have begun.
Math

Submission + - Patent all scientific discoveries urges mathematician (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP
00_NOP writes: All new scientific theories (and all new software) should be patented in the United States argues David Edwards, a retired associate professor of mathematics, writing in the current edition of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Edwards cites General Relativity as the sort of theory that could have been patented in the past.
Media

Submission + - The Largely Unknown Success Story of Afghanistan's Television Network (vice.com)

Submitted by
Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: "I met Orner at South by Southwest, where she was hustling her latest film, The Network. The Network features a brighter side of Afghanistan's brighter side: the story of its television revolution. In Orner's opinion, it's a narrative that runs contrary to our common conceptions of a country that has spent decades in a state of war and instability.

She followed Saad Mohseni, a media guru and founder of Afghan media firm Moby Group, who is credited for jump starting the nation's media transformation. Sometimes referred to as the Rupert Murdoch of Afghanistan, Mohseni, an Afghan expat and entrepreneur, explains how he and his siblings returned to Kabul from Australia in 2001, amidst the war shifting into gear. First, they launched a radio station, and by 2004 they'd shifted to television with Tolo TV, quickly turning Moby Group into the largest media conglomerate in the nation.

DS: I heard about 10 percent of Afghanistan has internet access, I saw ...

EO: No, I don't think that's accurate, I actually don't have the figures, I don't address them in the movie. I think the mobile phone capabilities are super high. A lot of people have Internet, they don't have it at home so much; they have it at work. Facebook is huge there. Twitter is not because a lot of them have phones, but they're not connected to the Internet, because it's really expensive to have mobile internet, but that will change very quickly.

From a country that 12 years ago was about 300 years back in time and had no interest in anything but water, was wanton to get to where it is now, which you'll see in the film is the change. It's been extraordinary. Just the change in life expectancy has gone up from about 46 to 64 in the last 10 years. The illiteracy rate, which is between 60 and 70 percent is falling rapidly. The average age of the population is 24. That's a really young country. They want to be connected, they want to be tech-savvy and they want to know what's going on in the rest of the world. They never want to go back to where they were 12 years ago."

Submission + - Big Eyes Using Too Much Brain Power Got Neanderthals Extinct

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Bigger eyes and a corresponding greater allocation of the brain to process visual information is the most recent theory about the reasons that led to the extinction of Neanderthals, our closest relatives, brought forward in a new study. Neanderthals split from the primate line that gave rise to modern humans about 400,000 years ago. This group then moved to Eurasia and completely disappeared from the world about 30,000 years back. Other studies have shown that Neanderthals might have lived near the Arctic Circle around 31,000 to 34,000 years ago.
GNU is Not Unix

Submission + - The Pirate Bay's Oldest Torrent is "Revolution OS" (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes: "After nearly 9 years of seeding The Pirate Bay’s oldest working torrent is still very much alive. Interestingly, the torrent is not a Hollywood classic nor is it an evergreen music album. The honor goes to a pirated copy of “Revolution OS”, a documentary covering the history of Linux, GNU and the free software movement."
Education

Submission + - Duolingo language learning working (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP
00_NOP writes: This week's New Scientist reports that Duolingo, a free online langauge learning service that also aims to translate the web is showing positive reults — with students taking 34 hours to reach the same level of proficiency in Spanish as first semester University students. The site is certainly easy to use and makes some bold claims about its values and aims — worth a second look, for sure.
Moon

Submission + - Death of the last great amateur scientist (wordpress.com)

Submitted by 00_NOP
00_NOP writes: The death of amateur astronomical legend Sir Patrick Moore surely marks the end of the era when amateurs could make an impact on science that would rival the professionals. Though many of Moore's ideas were disproved by space-borne probes, his impact on planetary astronomy was deep and profound, while his efforts at popularising astronomy were unmatched.

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