The first photos and videos from Venus, as well as the first TV picture from another planet in the history of mankind are quite extraordinary.

33 km is 1/3 of the way to space. Please stop perpetuating the boyscouts' sensationalist claims about weather balloons taking their junk "to the edge of space". That nonsense was written for the housewife moms, not for /.

Ugh... Americanism of cerebral cortex is running strong on /. today. Considering that the amount of "loose money" in Russia is about two orders of magnitude higher than in USA, why would Russian hackers ever target USA? Do hackers anywhere in the world target Zimbabwe? Ivory Coast? Haiti? Hackers target rich populations with high accessibility of "easy money", i.e. countries with large number of proverbial blondes carrying around 1-2 millions of US dollars cash as pocket money. And that spells "Russia". Bit a piss-poor craphole like USA??? Why would any hacker target it? Last occurrence of Russian hackers targeting anyone outside of Russia was recorded sometime around 2003. And now we get a suspiciously well-written piece with another set of fantastic claims... Sounds like someone in USA is trying to compensate for their inferiority complex by their delusion of grandeur :) Did Condoleezza Rice get back in the office? If not, who's guiding this 50-cent army on Slashdot? That's the question that needs answering.

97% of malware originates in USA. This is a well-known fact, which has been posted and discussed even here on /. repeatedly. Russia does produce malware, but most of it targets the local market. The reason this piece is making the news is that we are observing the rare case when foreign malware is detected on US market. This is indeed a rather strange and curious occurrence, since it makes no practical or economical sense for the perpetrators.

Well, it is all about comparative qualities, not absolute ones. Low or not, Russian product standards happen to be the highest available today. If you can find better ones - feel free to buy your batteries from them instead.

Last time I checked most of American secrets were secret for one reason only: so that no one would know that these secrets were stolen from Russians in the first place.

That's just doesn't make any sense. The amount of RAM is not a factor at all. The problem at hand is caused by the amount of _address_ _space_ required, not the amount of RAM. That's a completely different issue. I hope you understand the difference between the RAM and the address space. And the culprit is not VS or Microsoft compiler. The culprit is the rampant massive-scale global namespace pollution, which has been taking place in FF source code for quite a while. Someone was indulging recklessly in Linus-Torvalds-style coding practices. The result is perfectly logical.

It is not news to anyone that we are currently living through a massive wave of anti-Russian propaganda cooked by the rampant Nazi lobby inside the GOP. However, I have to admit this particular piece is too primitive even for those guys. "U.S. Air Force cyber analyst"? Sounds like John "Adolfie" McCain to me...

... As for admitting anything. No, actually. I'm a human being, not that de-bred organism that you are (i'm not sure they even have a scientific name for you). You don't get to meet human being too often in your silly life (if you can call that "life", of course), but today is your day apparently. Having a chance to speak to me, even if just over the Net, is the highest point of you stupid little life. Enjoy the moment. It will be all downhill from here.

It is not about what you can do. It is about what makes sense. Hackers in Eastern Europe has long ago focused entirely on targeting Eastern European victims. Nobody in the Eastern European computer crime scene even heard about some country you call "USA" ("Where is it? Somewhere in Africa?"). Targeting Eastern European victims simply makes more economical sense. It is easier, it is closer and, just for starters, the people there are significantly richer a typical American, in a sense that they have significantly more "loose" money on their hands.

Anti-aliasing, by definition, must be performed in object space or, possibly, in picture space. But it cannot be possibly carried out on an already rendered image. They must be trying to market some glorified blur technique under the anti-aliasing moniker. Nothing new here...

Yes, it is supposed to be controversial. You just missed the controversy. You see, the US State Department spends considerable amount of taxpayers money on disseminating propaganda about "Russian", "Ukrainian", "Romanian" and etc. hackers trying to get ahold of your credit card information in order to steal your identity. They just ignore obvious questions about why would all those people in Eastern Europe want to get this information (totally useless to them, of course), they just keep churning out the propaganda regardless of how nonsensical it is. The lemmings swallow this bullshit, and that's perfectly enough for the State Department. And now, suddenly we have some guy in GA with all the "loot" on his hands. Doesn't really fit into the picture. Of course, it is possible to twist the story to get the "Russian hackers" involved, at least making it believable enough for a typical ignorant lemming, but the "controversy" will still be there. No, I don't have any high hopes for it. It will quickly be forgotten. (And those who are not too quick to forget will quickly be explained that it is better to be more forgetful for their own good...) But nevertheless, it is rather interesting to see this story to pop up instead of getting "contained" as usual.

They have train vultures now? Ugh... Next time I'm in Germany I'll better take a car or a bus.

The linked video is raw: it was not edited in accordance with the US censorship requirements and was not fed through the typically mandatory US reality distortion filer. Consequently, it can case moderate to significant amounts of butthurt among the typical bumper-sticker-US-patriot types.

LOL! No. The currently standing record for GSM decryption "from scratch" requires several hours on a typical "supercomputer". You laptop will not not decrypt GSM communications "with a lag measured in seconds". On a laptop you can get "lag measured in seconds" only if you actually know the key, i.e. if you receive immediate direct support from the provider. BS like yours is usually spread around by crooks selling fake "cell intercept" software on the Net.