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Govt To Bomb Guam With Frozen Mice To Kill Snakes 229

Posted by samzenpus from the rodent-rain dept.
rhettb writes "In a spectacularly creative effort to rid Guam of the brown tree snake, an invasive species which has ravaged local wildlife and angered local residents, the US Department of Agriculture is planning to 'bomb' the island's rainforests with dead frozen mice laced with acetaminophen. While it might not seem difficult to purge an island of snakes, the snake's habit of dwelling high in the rainforest canopy has so far thwarted efforts to rid the island of the pest. Eradicating the snake is a priority because it triggers more than 100 power outages a year at a cost of $1-4 million and has driven at least 6 local bird species to extinction."

Comment Re:Procrastination (Score 1) 717

by Enderwiggin13 (#33746446) Attached to: There Is No Plan B, the Ugly Transition To IPv6
Yes it was hyperbole, but we already hear about users getting unfairly sued or threatened with being sued because their IP was supposedly torrenting copyrighted material. I can only imagine that NATing IPs would increase the probability of this happening.

If the **AAs crack team of network security pros can't correctly determine which user is using a static IP, how much trouble will they have with NAT IPs?

Comment Re:Procrastination (Score 2, Interesting) 717

by Enderwiggin13 (#33746182) Attached to: There Is No Plan B, the Ugly Transition To IPv6
Only if you consider the possibility of getting a letter from the RIAA/MPAA's lawyers trying to blackmail you for several thousand dollars because some teenager sharing your IP via NAT decided to torrent the latest Uwe Boll movie "disastrous".

Although, I guess if sharing IPs will make it more difficult for the RIAA/MPAA to "legally blackmail" people it can't be all bad.
Security

Submission + - Exploits Propagated Via Social Media Increase (net-security.org)

Submitted by Orome1
Orome1 writes: Infection via email, traditionally the most popular vector for spreading malware, has declined in favor of greater use of social media. These include clickjacking attacks using the Facebook "Like" button, fake Web pages positioned on search engines (BlackHat SEO) and zero-day vulnerability exploits. The rise in popularity of smart phones powered by Google's Android operating system for smart phones has been accompanied by an increase in attacks targeting these devices. A number of different threats have appeared, primarily aimed at racking up phone bills or using the geolocalization function to transmit a user's position to a third party.
Education

Submission + - How Well Will Linux Handle Future Multicores? (mit.edu)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: Multicore (think tens or hundreds of cores) will come at a price for current operating systems. A team at MIT found that as they approached 48 cores their operating system slowed down. After activating more and more cores in their simulation, a sort of memory leak occurred whereby data had to remain in memory as long as a core might need it in its calculations. But the good news is that in their paper (PDF), they showed that for at least several years Linux should be able to keep up with chip enhancements in the multicore realm. To handle multiple cores, Linux keeps a counter of which cores are working on the data. As a core starts to work on a piece of data, Linux increments the number. When the core is done, Linux decrements the number. As the core count approached 48, the amount of actual work decreased and Linux spent more time managing counters. But the team found that 'Slightly rewriting the Linux code so that each core kept a local count, which was only occasionally synchronized with those of the other cores, greatly improved the system's overall performance.' The researchers caution that as the number of cores skyrockets, operating systems will have to be completely redesigned to handle managing these cores and SMP. After reviewing the paper, one researcher is confident Linux will remain viable for five to eight years without need for a major redesign.
Space

Submission + - Unseen moon landing video released (australiangeographic.com.au)

Submitted by bazzalunatic
bazzalunatic writes: Digitally remastered footage of the moon landing, including high-quality and brighter images of Neil Armstrong stepping off the ladder will be shown for the first time ever to general public at an awards ceremony in Sydney, Australia. The magnetic data tapes seem to have all been lost — erased — by NASA, so all that's left if VHS recordings, which have been restored, giving the best-ever film of the whole moon landing. The publicity over this seems to be pushing NASA into releasing the whole 3-hr recording.
Movies

Torrent-Only Movie Denied IMDb Listing 207

Posted by samzenpus from the no-list-for-you dept.
An anonymous reader writes "A film set to be released for free via BitTorrent has been denied a listing in the Internet Movie Database. The Tunnel is currently in production and despite pleas from the makers, IMDb won't allow it on their site. The creators of this horror movie believe that because they have shunned an official distributor and chosen a BitTorrent model instead, this has put them at a disadvantage with the Amazon-owned site."

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