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United States

Submission + - US Senate Considering Ban On Texting While Driving (zdnet.com)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: Following recent reports on the dangers of drivers being preoccupied by their cell phones, the U.S. Senate is now considering legislation to ban text messaging while driving. This could even be a step toward a total of ban of using cell phones while driving.

Here are the big reports that recently came to light:

- Texting while driving increases crash risk 23-fold ( http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10296992-94.html ) based on a Virginia University study

- A Car and Driver study showed that texting-and-driving is far more dangerous than drinking-and-driving ( http://www.caranddriver.com/features/09q2/texting_while_driving_how_dangerous_is_it_-feature )

There are already 14 U.S. states (plus Washington, D.C.) that ban drivers from text messaging.

The Washington Post reports ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/29/AR2009072902039.html ) that the ban in D.C. has made a significant impact: "A 2006 study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety showed a significant decline in phone use by drivers in the District because of the ban. It fell 50 percent initially and remained at that level a year later."

ZDNet : http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=22132
Security

Submission + - Defcon, Black Hat attendee finds more dodgy ATMs (computerworlduk.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As if it weren't enough that one bogus ATM was discovered collecting card details at the Riviera in Las Vegas where Black Hat and Defcon attendees were staying, one presenter suspects that ATMs at the Rio were compromised as well. Chris Paget tried to take out $200 and the machine never gave him the money despite debiting his account. At least five other people were affected. The hotel staff allowed the machines to keep running and threatened that Paget could be prosecuted for vandalism if he unplugged them. The Secret Service confirmed on Monday that they're investigating. It could be an inside job, or the machines may be infected with malware, as was found earlier this year in Eastern Europe.
United States

Journal SPAM: McCain Ineligible for Presidency? 7

Journal by Jeremiah Cornelius

7 FAM 1116.1-4 Not Included in the Meaning of "In the United States"

([spam URL stripped]; 11-30-95)

a. A U.S.-registered or documented ship on the high seas or in the exclusive economic zone is not considered to be part of the United States. A child born on such a vessel does not acquire U.S. citizenship by reason of the place of birth (Lam Mow v. Nagle, 24 F.2d 316 (9th Cir., 1928)).
United States

Journal SPAM: InfraGuard Prepped for Martial Law: "When" not "If" 2

Journal by Jeremiah Cornelius

Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does--and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, t
Security

Submission + - Mac, BSD prone to decade old attacks 7

Submitted by BSDer
BSDer writes: An Israeli security researcher published a paper few hours ago, detailing attacks against Mac, OpenBSD and other BSD-style operating systems. The attacks, says Amit Klein from Trusteer enable DNS cache poisoning, IP level traffic analysis, host detection, O/S fingerprinting and in some cases even TCP blind data injection. The irony is that OpenBSD boasted their protection mechanism against those exact attacks when a similar attack against the BIND DNS server was disclosed by the same researcher mid 2007. It seems now that OpenBSD may need to revisit their code and their statements. According to the researcher, another affected party, Apple, refused to commit to any fix timelines. It would be interesting to see their reaction now that this paper is public.
Patents

Submission + - Piracy Can Be Good: in non-geek language (theglobeandmail.com)

Submitted by
crazybilly
crazybilly writes: "Explaining why piracy isn't bad for businesses can be difficult, especially when talking to nontechnical people. Globeandmail.com provides an article explaining not only why piracy isn't necessary bad for business buy how piracy has benefited buisnesses and artist (including Hollywood) in the past. Using historical examples, ranging from Daniel Defoe to the VCR, they make a strong case for why the RIAA and company ought to relax."
Databases

Submission + - Best Architecture for Massive Database Scalability

Submitted by
pilbender
pilbender writes: "I work for a company that uses Oracle. We are having trouble meeting our End User License Agreements which were set up prior to most of the IT staff being hired. This project was acquired from another entity and we are being asked to make it perform over 90% of its transactions in under 2 seconds. One of the issues we face is that these transactions search through large amounts of data, more like a data mining application, but are required to finish in a very short amount of time. It seems to us that these types of operations are mutually exclusive and these concerns have been explained to the current leadership.

I would like to know what the best architecture is for scalability. Is it simply the Oracle 10g grid on cheap Linux servers? Is it better to go to IBM blades? We are using the P570 with Oracle 9i right now and it appears well rated on http://www.tpc.org/. Are there any other sites/resources that provide unbiased information on platform performance and database performance?

We feel we have exhausted options like tuning our queries, bringing in consultants, and fixing the I/O bottleneck. We have moved to a SAN storage array and it has not helped. I would like suggestions from the community on what would best increase performance and future scalability from a hardware perspective. We need to scale the system 20 times what it is now, which is currently around 60k transactions/month. Switching relational databases is almost out of the question, but those suggestions like massive scaling of Postgres would be welcome."
Announcements

Submission + - NEC develops world's fastest SRAM-compatible MRAM

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: NEC today announced that it has developed a new SRAM-compatible MRAM (Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory) that can operate at 250MHz — the world's fastest MRAM operation speed. MRAM is expected to be the dominant next-generation memory technology as it realizes ultra fast operation speeds, nonvolatility and unlimited write endurance.
Security

Submission + - Researchers Predict Outcome of 2008 US Election (win.tue.nl) 3

Submitted by
ThisNukes4u
ThisNukes4u writes: "As announced earlier today, Marc Stevens, Arjen Lenstra and Benne de Weger have announced that they can predict the outcome of the 2008 US Presidential Election with 100% accuracy using the Playstation 3. In related news, they have also announced a "Vulnerability of software integrity and code signing applications to chosen-prefix collisions for MD5". Is this the final death knell for MD5 and other similar-length hashes, now that computing power has advanced enough that finding collisions is feasible on modern customer hardware?"
Security

Submission + - Government-sponsored cyberattacks on the rise (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by
jbrodkin
jbrodkin writes: "A new McAfee report finds that 120 countries, notably the United States and China, are launching Web espionage operations. Government-sponsored cyber attacks against enemy countries are becoming more common, targeting critical systems including electricity, air traffic control, financial markets and government computer networks. This year, Russia allegedly attacked Estonian government news and bank servers, while China was accused of hacking into the Pentagon. A McAfee researcher says this trend will accelerate, noting "it's easier to attack government X's database than it is to nuke their troops.""
Graphics

Submission + - AMD R6xx Image Quality Analyzed (beyond3d.com)

Submitted by
Steve Kerrison
Steve Kerrison writes: "The most recent graphics chips to come off of AMD and Nvidia's production lines have added performance boosts and support for DirectX 10. But what about image quality? Beyond3D looks at the image quality features of the R6xx family of GPUs, where AMD has been adding a few tricks:

What follows is our look at AMD R6-series image quality as it stands, and it's one that focuses on the AA down-filter more than anything else. It's where AMD have changed the game the most, introducing forward-looking custom filters...
"
Software

Submission + - The Really Fair Scheduler (kerneltrap.org)

Submitted by
derrida
derrida writes: "During the many threads discussing Ingo Molnar's recently merged Completely Fair Scheduler, Roman Zippel has repeatedly questioned the complexity of the new process scheduler. In a recent posting to the Linux Kernel mailing list he offered a simpler scheduler named the 'Really Fair Scheduler' saying, "as I already tried to explain previously CFS has a considerable algorithmic and computational complexity. This patch should now make it clearer, why I could so easily skip over Ingo's long explanation of all the tricks CFS uses to keep the computational overhead low — I simply don't need them.""

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