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Submission + - Helping a billion people see clearly (ox.ac.uk)

Submitted by Ristoril
Ristoril writes: The term "nerd" has a certain stereotypical accessory associated with it: spectacles. Dr. Joshua Silver of Oxford University wants to bring this indispensable accoutrement of nerd-dom to billions of poor across the world. He and others have established the Centre for Vision in the Developing World (the latest incarnation of Adaptive Eyecare) for this purpose. Their goal is to distribute 1 billion adjustable eyeglasses to the poor of the world by the year 2020 (har har).

The glasses consist of a membrane that can be filled with fluid by the owner to meet their vision correction needs. No optician needed. I believe as the website that produces "News for Nerds," the readers of Slashdot will find this movement to be very compelling. I plan to donate as soon as possible, and perhaps to figure out a way to get myself a pair!
Microsoft

Submission + - Are Microsoft to blame for "hidden" malware costs (freesoftwaremagazine.com)

Submitted by malvert
malvert writes: Even the most ardent Windows fan can’t really argue with the fact that their favourite OS has a significantly greater number of malware threats against it than any free software OS will have. The popular reason given for this is the high proportion of Windows boxes makes for a tempting target for the people behind the malware. This is a reasonable argument but it cannot be taken as the only defence here.

If the number of installs is proportional to the number of threats, why have we not seen even a small increase in the number of malware threats against free OS? After all the number of Internet-facing GNU/Linux and *BSD machines around now measures considerably higher than the number for say five years ago. Even allowing for the fact that the percentage of desktop machines using a free OS may not have increased (and I don’t believe that’s a valid argument anyway), the actual number of machines is likely to have increased. Yet we do not see malware writers increasingly targetting free OS users.

When your chosen platform forces you to instruct users to do things in an entirely counter-intuitive way, you need to change your platform
Data Storage

Submission + - Hands on with SATA 6Gbps (bit-tech.net)

Submitted by mr_sifter
mr_sifter writes: Bit-tech has some performance numbers from SATA 6Gbps motherboards and Barracuda XT drives from Seagate: "What's new? Well there's a new Native Command Queuing (NCQ) streaming command for Isochronous data transfers and NCQ management features, and a new connector for 1.8in hard drives, but the most fundamental part of the update for us is the speed bump..."
Security

Submission + - Russian hacking gangs exploit Swine Flu panic (sophos.com)

Submitted by Unexpof
Unexpof writes: Computer security researchers broke into a criminal affiliate network operating out of Russia, and discovered that its members were able to earn an average of $16,000 a day ($5.8 million a year) promoting pharmaceuticals such as Tamiflu. Some hackers boasted of earning over $100,000 a day.

The network (known as the Partnerka) uses spam, search engine poisoning and botnets to bring traffic to the fake pharmacy sites (such as "Canadian Pharmacy"), earning their affiliates up to 40% of the eventual sale.

The top five countries purchasing Tamiflu and other drugs from the Canadian Pharmacy are:

1. United States
2. Germany
3. United Kingdom
4. Canada
5. France.

Sophos claims that it discovered that panic that global Tamiflu production was falling behind schedule in July, lead to a 1400% increase in UK internet searches for Tamiflu — leading unsuspecting users to dangerous pharmaceutical websites.

Comment Re:paper in your wallet (Score 1) 1007

by slaad (#30059958) Attached to: Best Tool For Remembering Passwords?
It wouldn't really be the same thing. Amongst other features, Keepass has something called auto-type. It allows you to hit a key combination and then it will automatically fill in the user name and password. This makes it not only safe but also very easy to use.

Comment Re:surprise (Score 1) 376

by slaad (#29847073) Attached to: Of Encrypted Hard Drives and "Evil Maids"
From TFA -

Step 1: Attacker gains access to your shut-down computer and boots it from a separate volume. The attacker writes a hacked bootloader onto your system, then shuts it down.

The machine is already off. It's more like while you're away from home, even though your door is closed and secured using your very expensive lock, someone installs a camera that isn't easily detected and as the next time you unlock your door it takes a picture of the key that someone else can then use to unlock the door later.

Submission + - Privacy Ally Fights To Republish SSNs On Website (computerworld.com)

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes: A fight to stop a Virginia privacy advocate from republishing on her Website Social Security numbers obtained legally from public records on government sites is attracting the attention of some privacy heavyweights, including the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). EPIC filed a friend of the court brief asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to uphold Betty Ostergren's First Amendment right to publish the numbers.Ostergren's campaign has succeeded in the past in forcing state and county governments to revise images of public records that were posted online or to break online links to document images containing Social Security numbers.
Biotech

Submission + - Evolution May Lead to Shorter, Heavier Women 2

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "Yale University researchers report that while survival to reproductive age is no longer such a hurdle for humans, other evolutionary pressures – including sexual selection and reproductive fitness – are still working away in full force and if the trends detected in their study are representative and continue for another 10 generations, the average woman in 2409 AD will be 2 cm shorter, 1 kg heavier, will bear her first child five months earlier, and enter the menopause 10 months later. "There is this idea that because medicine has been so good at reducing mortality rates, that means that natural selection is no longer operating in humans," said Stephen Stearns of Yale University. "That's just plain false." Stearns and his team studied the medical histories of 14,000 residents of the Massachusetts town of Framingham, using medical data from a study going back to 1948 spanning three generations and found that shorter, heavier women had more children than lighter, taller ones. Women with lower blood pressure and cholesterol were also more likely to have large families as were women who gave birth early or had a late menopause. More importantly these traits are then passed on to their daughters, who also, on average, had more children. The study has not determined why these factors are linked to reproductive success, but it is likely that they indicate genetic, rather than environmental, effects. "The evolution that's going on in the Framingham women is like average rates of evolution measured in other plants and animals," said Stearns. ""These results place humans in the medium-to-slow end of the range of rates observed for other living things.""
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - SPAM: A $30 Billion US census!?

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: The number seemed staggering, but there it was. The cost of conducting the census has, on average, doubled each decade since 1970. If that rate of cost escalation continues into 2020, the nation could be looking at a $30 billion census.

That was the conclusion of the Government Accountability Office in a report issued this week on the status of some of the Census Bureaus key systems.

"Rigorous planning and perhaps even a fundamental reexamination of the census might be required because the current approach to the national enumeration may no longer be financially sustainable," the repot stated.

[spam URL stripped]
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Schrödinger's virus (economist.com) 1

Submitted by PolygamousRanchKid
PolygamousRanchKid writes: ONE of the most famous unperformed experiments in science is Schrö's cat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrönger's_cat). Schrö's intention was to illuminate the paradoxes of the quantum world. But superposition (the existence of a thing in two or more quantum states simultaneously) is real and is, for example, the basis of quantum computing. A pair of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, now propose to do what Schrödinger could not, and put a living organism into a state of quantum superposition.

Submission + - Bill Gates comments on piracy in 1976 (lettersofnote.com)

Submitted by j-cloth
j-cloth writes: On February 3rd, 1976, almost 10 years prior to the unveiling of Windows 1.0, an irate Bill Gates wrote the following open letter to hobbyists in response to piracy of Altair BASIC, the BASIC interpreter Gates had produced with Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff which was essentially the first piece of software ever released by Microsoft (then named Micro-Soft). The letter was published in a number of leading computer publications and, interestingly, initial versions of the software itself predated the widespread introduction of floppy disks, and as such were released on paper tape. Hence this photo of Altair BASIC 8K.

Interesting comment from an early Gates that talks legitimately about piracy but seems to preclude the possibility of the hobbyists giving back via open source (and other volunteer projects)
Science

Submission + - Hyperdrive Propulsion Could Be Tested At The LHC (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by KentuckyFC
KentuckyFC writes: In 1924, the influential German mathematician, David Hilbert, calculated that a stationary mass should repel a particle moving towards or away from it at more than half the speed of light (as seen by a distant inertial observer). Now an American physicist has pointed out that the equal and opposite effect should also hold true: that a relativistic particle should repel a stationary mass. This, he says, could form the basis of a "hyperveolcity propulsion drive" for accelerating spacecraft to a good fraction of the speed of light. The idea is that the repulsion allows the relatavisitic particle to deliver a specific impulse that is greater than its specific momentum, an effect that is analogous to the elastic collision of a heavy mass with a much lighter, stationary mass, from which the lighter mass rebounds with about twice the speed of the heavy mass. Unlike other exotic hyperdrive proposals, this one can be tested using the world's largest particle accelerator, the LHC, which will generate beams of particles with the required energy (abstract). Placing a test mass next to the beam line and measuring the forces on it as the particles pass by, should confirm the theory--or scupper it entirely.
Nintendo

Wii Update 4.2 Tries (and Fails) To Block Homebrew 520

Posted by Soulskill from the broke-and-fixed dept.
marcansoft writes "On September 28, Nintendo released a Wii update, titled 4.2. This update was targeted squarely at homebrew, performing sweeping changes throughout the system. It hardly achieved that goal, though, because just two days later a new version of the HackMii installer was released that brings full homebrew capabilities back to all Wii consoles, including unmodified consoles running 4.2. However, as part of their attempt to annoy homebrew users, Nintendo updated the lowest level updateable component of the Wii software stack: boot2 (part of the system bootloader chain). Homebrew users have been using BootMii to patch boot2 in order to gain low level system access and recovery functions (running Linux natively, fixing bricks, etc). The update hasn't hindered this, as users can simply reinstall BootMii after updating (it is compatible with the update). But there's a much bigger problem: Nintendo's boot2 update code is buggy." Read on for more details.
Social Networks

Submission + - Study Finds Twitter is 40% Pointless Babble

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Recently, Pear Analytics attempted to find out how people are actually using Twitter. "Some felt it was their source of news and articles, others felt it was just a bunch of self-promotion," writes Ryan Kelly, "But mostly, many people still perceive Twitter as just mindless babble of people telling you what they are doing minute-by-minute." Their results? 40.55% of the total tweets captured were classified as "Pointless Babble," with person-to-person conversational tweets coming in a close second at 37.55%. Only 8.7% of the tweets were actually deemed worthy of passing on to others.

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