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Communications

Journal Journal: SIP over TCP - using it in NAT friendly way

Journal by neutrino38

I have recently browsed through the latest SIP RFC looking for ways to be more NAT friendly for VoIP.

What I found is not very conclusive: The latest RFC indeed tries to push TCP as default transport for SIP (Yessss signalling links are making a come back) but the use of TCP connection is left to a lot of ambiguities.
Security

Submission + - Most Comprehensive Reverse Hash Lookup (MD5, etc)

Submitted by
Dustin Fineout
Dustin Fineout writes: "A new reverse hash look-up web site has been launched which conglomerates the separate efforts of many such sites into a single resource. http://md5.dustinfineout.com/ searches both local databases and several remote servers to create the most comprehensive reverse hash look-up available anywhere, and in under ten seconds.

The initial version, launched yesterday, offers reverse hash look-up for the MD5 algorithm on a total of six servers' databases. By the end of the week, support for SHA1, MD2, MD4, LanMan, and NTLM algorithms have been promised, as well as expanding the server pool to at least 10 different data sources. The web application also allows visitors to add entries to the datapool by checking for their existence in all servers in the datapool before adding to a local database. The source code for both the online PHP application and several Java programs are also scheduled to be released under the BSD license by the end of this week."
Displays

Rollable E Ink Displays Get Real 116

Posted by CmdrTaco from the just-don't-crease-it dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Two years ago Philips unveiled a prototype of a functional electronic-document reader, called the Readius, which could unroll its display to a scale larger than the device itself. Unfortunately, that was only a prototype. According to Cnet, however, Polymer Vision, which spun out from Philips in 2006, has redesigned the Readius and turned it into a real product that it is going to be available by the end of this year. There are some notable differences between this Readius and the prototype version, in particular, the ability to display 16 shades of grey instead of just 4 and the connectivity options. What doesn't make sense though, is given the energy efficiency and easy-to-read high contrast functionality of E Ink, why other than Motorola with its Motofone, has no other cell phone manufacturer incorporated E Ink technology into its handsets?"
NASA

Submission + - Take out asteroid soon, UN urged

Submitted by stevedmc
stevedmc writes: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,21247126-2,00 .html

THE United Nations has been urged to launch a space mission designed to take out an asteroid threatening to smash into the Earth in 2036.

In scenes straight out of Hollywood action movie Armageddon, a group of astronauts, engineers and scientists say they are monitoring an asteroid named Apophis, which has a one in 45,000 chance of striking Earth on April 13, 2036.

A recent congressional mandate for NASA to upgrade its tracking of near-Earth asteroids is expected to uncover a host of threatening space rocks in the near future, former astronaut Rusty Schweickart said.

"It's not just Apophis we're looking at. Every country is at risk. We need a set of general principles to deal with this issue," Mr Schweickart, a member of the Apollo 9 crew that orbited the moon in March 1969, told an American Association for the Advancement of Science conference.

Mr Schweickart plans to present an update this week to the UN Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space on plans to develop a blueprint for a global response to an asteroid threat.

The Association of Space Explorers, a group of former astronauts and cosmonauts, intends to host a series of high-level workshops this year to flesh out the plan and will make a formal proposal to the UN in 2009, he said.
Space

Interstellar Ark 703

Posted by CmdrTaco from the yeah-good-luck-with-that dept.
xantox writes "There are three strategies to travel 10.5 light-years from Earth to Epsilon Eridani and bring humanity into a new stellar system : 1) Wait for future discovery of Star Trek physics and go there almost instantaneously, 2) Build a relativistic rocket powered by antimatter and go there in 22 years by accelerating constantly at 1g, provided that you master stellar amounts of energy (so, nothing realistic until now), but what about 3): go there by classical means, by building a gigantic Ark of several miles in radius, propulsed by nuclear fusion and featuring artificial gravity, oceans and cities, for a travel of seven centuries — where many generations of men and women would live ? This new speculation uses some actual physics and math to figure out how far are our fantasies of space travel from their actual implementation."
Space

Submission + - Einstein's twin paradox resolved

Submitted by
slashthedot
slashthedot writes: "An Indian American scientist Subhash Kak from Louisiana State University has resolved the 100+ years old Einstein's twin paradox. "The fact that time slows down on moving objects has been documented and verified over the years through repeated experimentation. But, in the previous scenario, the paradox is that the earthbound twin is the one who would be considered to be in motion — in relation to the sibling — and therefore should be the one aging more slowly. Einstein and other scientists have attempted to resolve this problem before, but none of the formulas they presented proved satisfactory. Kak's findings were published online in the International Journal of Theoretical Science, and will appear in the upcoming print version of the publication."
"The implications of this resolution will be widespread, generally enhancing the scientific community's comprehension of relativity. It may eventually even have some impact on quantum communications and computers, potentially making it possible to design more efficient and reliable communication systems for space applications."
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-02/lsu -lpr021407.php"
Microsoft

Submission + - The *REAL* facts of Linux vs Windows ?

Submitted by yorugua
yorugua writes: From the report: "Considering the publicity that has surrounded — and, despite super new security-focused Service Packs, continues to surround — Windows security issues, Microsoft's determination to demonstrate that Linux is less secure than Windows shows a certain chutzpah. The company has however had some support here; Forrester, for example, provides some numbers that can be used to support the contention that Microsoft flaws are less severe, less numerous and fixed faster. And although there's a general readiness among users to believe that Windows is a security disaster area, there's also a reasonable amount of support for the view that Linux would get just as many security issues if it had anything like Windows' user base.". PDF available at http://regmedia.co.uk/2004/10/22/security_report_w indows_vs_linux.pdf . Let the flam^H^H^H^Hdiscussion begin.
Toys

Tech Toys Dominate Toy Fair 2007 48

Posted by Zonk from the take-me-to-your-elmo dept.
Edis Krad writes "An CNN Money article previews the Hot Toys for 2007 from this past week's Toy Fair. The article is a great place to start looking through the hundreds of new products that were on display at the annual industry event. Among those featured in the article, I was particularly impressed with the Video Journal (blogging for kids?), the virtual bicycle (apparently, riding a real bicycle isn't cool enough anymore), and last but not least, the robotic parrot, that oddly reminds me of the replicant owl in Blade Runner. For more details on tech toys at the event, IEEE Spectrum has a rundown on the nerdier toys available. Artificial snow and a pre-assembled Mentos/Coke kit were two of that journalist's favorites. For different perspectives Forbes has a look at the toy business as it stands since last week, and Wired's Luddite column crabs that kids have too many techie toys nowadays. Dagnabit."
Biotech

Suppressed Report Shows Cancer Link to GM Potatoes 325

Posted by Zonk from the politics-and-potatoes-and-science-mix-poorly dept.
Doc Ruby writes "After an 8-year-long court battle, Welsh activists have finally been allowed to released a Russian study showing an increased cancer risk linked to eating genetically modified potatoes. While the victory of the Welsh Greenpeace members in the courtroom would seem to vindicate the work of the Russian scientists that did the original research, there are still serious questions to be answered. The trials involved rats being fed several types of potatoes as feed. The rats who were fed GM potatoes suffered much more extensive damage to their organs than with any other type; just the same, serious questions remain about the validity of the findings. The Welsh group wants to use this information to stop the testing of GM crops in the UK, tests currently slated for the spring of this year."
Data Storage

Google Releases Paper on Disk Reliability 267

Posted by Zonk from the fun-saturday-night-reading dept.
oski4410 writes "The Google engineers just published a paper on Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population. Based on a study of 100,000 disk drives over 5 years they find some interesting stuff. To quote from the abstract: 'Our analysis identifies several parameters from the drive's self monitoring facility (SMART) that correlate highly with failures. Despite this high correlation, we conclude that models based on SMART parameters alone are unlikely to be useful for predicting individual drive failures. Surprisingly, we found that temperature and activity levels were much less correlated with drive failures than previously reported.'"
Mozilla

Submission + - EverQuest II embeds Mozilla browser

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: EverQuest II's next release will include an embedding of the Mozilla browser. It's currently live on the test server and has a few issues that will hopefully be resolved before release.

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?st art=15&topic_id=347230

Some interesting uses of the browser such as automatically searching for quest hints are being discussed on the interface board:

http://www.eq2interface.com/forums/showthread.php? t=7846

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