quippe - Slashdot User

Submission + - Now You Can Run Linux, BSD On Any UEFI Secure Boot PC (muktware.com)

Submitted by sfcrazy on Saturday October 13, 2012 @02:55AM

sfcrazy writes: The Linux Foundation has released a pre-booter which enabled any Linux or BSD distribution to run on any UEFI Secure boot windows PC. The Linux Foundation will obtain a Microsoft Key and sign a small pre-bootloader which will, in turn, chain load (without any form of signature check) a predesignated boot loader which will, in turn, boot Linux (or any other operating system).

Submission + - Automated DMCA Takedown Notices Request Censorship of Legitimate Sites (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by

Techmeology

on Sunday October 07, 2012 @05:08PM

Techmeology writes: "Microsoft has sent automated DMCA notices to Google demanding the removal of several legitimate URLs from its search results that it claims were facilitating the distribution if illegal copies of Windows 8, including links to BBC news articles, Wikipedia pages, US government websites, and even Bing! The erroneous DMCA notices are being sent automatically by rights holders, who are increasingly using such techniques."

Submission + - Suspicion that Kim Dotcom was being spied on for longer than admitted (nzherald.co.nz)

Submitted by another random user on Saturday October 06, 2012 @07:12AM

another random user writes: Kim Dotcom's internet connection was being diverted inside New Zealand weeks before the Government Communications Security Bureau says it started spying on him.

The New Zealand Herald has obtained details showing Telecom engineers and staff at its technology services company Gen-I were investigating irregularities with his internet connection in November.

The revelation has raised suspicion that Mr Dotcom was victim to earlier spying than the GCSB has admitted. It has brought fresh calls for an inquiry amid claims of the spy agency's role in the international "Five Eyes" Echelon Network.

Submission + - Google Puts Souped-up Neural Networks to Work (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by holy_calamity on Friday October 05, 2012 @07:20PM

holy_calamity writes: A machine learning breakthrough from Google researchers that grabbed headlines this summer is now being put to work improving the company's products. The company revealed in June that it had built neural networks that run on 16,000 processors simultaneously, enough power that they could learn to recognize cats just by watching YouTube. Those neural nets have now made Google's speech recognition for US English 25 percent better, and are set to be used in other products, such as image search.

Submission + - Weather on Mars surprisingly pleasant, Curiosity rover finds Read more: http:// (foxnews.com)

Submitted by

hessian

on Tuesday October 02, 2012 @06:46PM

hessian writes: "Curiosity's onboard weather station, which is called the Remote Environment Monitoring Station (REMS), has measured air temperatures as high as 43 degrees Fahrenheit (6 degrees Celsius) in the afternoon. And temperatures have climbed above freezing during more than half of the Martian days, or sols, since REMS was turned on, scientists said.

These measurements are a bit unexpected, since it's still late winter at Gale Crater, the spot 4.5 degrees south of the Martian equator where Curiosity touched down on Aug. 5.

"That we are seeing temperatures this warm already during the day is a surprise and very interesting," Felipe Gómez, of the Centro de Astrobiología in Madrid, said in a statement."

Submission + - Keccak is the winner of NIST's SHA-3 competition (nist.gov)

Submitted by

fintler

on Tuesday October 02, 2012 @06:01PM

fintler writes: "The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is pleased to announce the selection of Keccak as the winner of the SHA-3 Cryptographic Hash Algorithm Competition and the new SHA-3 hash algorithm. Keccak was designed by a team of cryptographers from Belgium and Italy, they are:

* Guido Bertoni (Italy) of STMicroelectronics,
* Joan Daemen (Belgium) of STMicroelectronics,
* Michaël Peeters (Belgium) of NXP Semiconductors, and
* Gilles Van Assche (Belgium) of STMicroelectronics.

NIST formally announced the SHA-3 competition in 2007 with an open call for the submission of candidate hash algorithms, and received 64 submissions from cryptographers around the world. In an ongoing review process, including two open conferences, the cryptographic community provided an enormous amount of expert feedback, andNIST winnowed the original 64 candidates down to the five finalist candidates – BLAKE, Grøstl, JH, Keccak and Skein. These finalists were further reviewed in a third public conference in March 2012.

NIST chose Keccak over the four other excellent finalists for its elegant design, large security margin, good general performance, excellent efficiency in hardware implementations, and for its flexibility. Keccak uses a new “sponge construction” chaining mode, based on a fixed permutation, that can readily be adjusted to trade generic security strength for throughput, and can generate larger or smaller hash outputs as required. The Keccak designers have also defined a modified chaining mode for Keccak that provides authenticated encryption. Additionally, Keccak complements the existing SHA-2 family of hash algorithms well. NIST remains confident in the security of SHA-2 which is now widely implemented, and the SHA-2 hash algorithms will continue to be used for the foreseeable future, as indicated in the NIST hash policy statement. One benefit that Keccak offers as the SHA-3 winner is its difference in design and implementation properties from that of SHA-2. It seems very unlikely that a single new cryptanalytic attack or approach could threaten both algorithms. Similarly, the very different implementation properties of the two algorithms will allow future application and protocol designers greater flexibility infinding one of the two hash algorithms that fits well with their requirements. NIST thanks the many people in companies, universities, laboratories and organizations around the world that participated in and contributed to the SHA-3 competition, especially the submitters of all the candidate algorithms, and the many others who contributed expert cryptanalysis, and performance studies. NIST could not have done the competition without them.

A detailed report of the final round of the competition will be published in the near future. Information about the SHA-3 competition is available at: http://www.nist.gov/hash-competition"

Submission + - Using Bee Brains To Make Robots Smarter (isciencetimes.com)

Submitted by amkkhan on Tuesday October 02, 2012 @10:47AM

amkkhan writes: The key to helping robots be more autonomous may lie in bees, according to new research from the University of Sheffield, in the United Kingdom. Researchers said that future robots mimic the sensory systems of a bee, which would allow it to act autonomously, instead of carrying out a set of instructions.

Researchers anticipate using such robots for a wide range of applications, such as search and rescue missions and crop pollination.

Until now, research into the recreation of biological brains has focused on larger animals, such as monkeys and mice. However, the researcher said the bee brain is surprisingly complex, and would be a good target to recreate.

Submission + - Codeweavers is giving away Crossover if 100,000 people pledge to vote. (codeweavers.com)

Submitted by weatherkid on Tuesday October 02, 2012 @10:14AM

weatherkid writes: Codeweavers is giving away their Crossover program for free if 100,000 people pledge to vote this year. Crossover is a closed-source version of WINE. According to their ticker, they are over 80% complete.

Submission + - Great Barrier Reef faces rapid coral loss (aims.gov.au)

Submitted by

quippe

on Tuesday October 02, 2012 @10:04AM

quippe writes: "The world's largest coral reef — under threat from Australia's surging coal and gas shipments, climate change and a destructive starfish — is declining faster than ever and coral cover could fall to just 5 percent in the next decade, a study shows.

The Great Barrier Reef has lost half its coral cover in the last 27 years. The loss was due to storm damage (48%), crown of thorns starfish (42%), and bleaching (10%) according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today by researchers from the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) in Townsville and the University of Wollongong."

Submission + - TDK areal density breakthrough paves way for 6TB hard drives (geek.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 02, 2012 @09:28AM

An anonymous reader writes: SSDs may be leading the way on performance storage, but they still can’t compete with hard drives on price or level of storage per drive. And now TDK has pushed the bar even higher by increasing the areal density of its hard drives by 50%.

What TDK did was to employ a new magnetic head that uses thermal assist recording and a near-light field. Where as previously TDK had maxed out areal density at 1Tbit/inch2, this new head and associated tech increases that density to 1.5Tbits/inch2. In real terms that means TDK can offer 1TB of storage per platter in a 2.5-inch hard drive, and 2TB of storage per platter in a 3.5-inch drive. That means we will see 1, 2, and 3 platter 3.5-inch hard drives offering 2TB, 4TB, and 6TB of storage respectively. 2.5-inch hard drives and the Ultrabook-friendly 7mm drives will also benefit from a stroage increase.

Submission + - Galaxy Note 2 Release Sparks a New Round of Patent Sueing (reuters.com)

Submitted by Croakyvoice on Tuesday October 02, 2012 @08:42AM

Croakyvoice writes: It was released in Korea a few weeks ago and now Samsung have released the Galaxy Note 2 in the UK, the new iPhone 5 rival boasts 16GB of memory, comes with Android Jelly Bean installed, a massive 5.5" HD Super AMOLED screen, 16:9 screen ratio, 1.6 GHz quad-core processor, 3100mAh battery, 8 megapixel camera with best shot feature, S Pen functionality and is HSPA+ compatible. Now Samsung are sueing Apple over the iPhone 5 claiming that the phone has infringed on its patents.

Submission + - $1 Billiion Dollar Mission to Reach the Earths Mantle (cnn.com) 1

Submitted by black6host on Tuesday October 02, 2012 @08:24AM

black6host writes: Humans have reached the moon and are planning to return samples from Mars, but when it comes to exploring the land deep beneath our feet, we have only scratched the surface of our planet. This may be about to change with a $1 billion mission to drill 6 km (3.7 miles) beneath the seafloor to reach the Earth's mantle — a 3000 km-thick layer of slowly deforming rock between the crust and the core which makes up the majority of our planet — and bring back the first ever fresh samples.

Submission + - Ice may lurk in shadows beyond Moon's poles (nature.com)

Submitted by

ananyo

on Monday October 01, 2012 @08:14AM

ananyo writes: "Water ice on the Moon may be more widespread than previously thought. Permanent shadows have been spotted far from the lunar poles, expanding the number of sites that would be good candidates for exploration by robotic rovers — or even for the locations of lunar bases."

Submission + - UK Ministers' Private Communications Subject to Freedom of Information Act (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by

Techmeology

on Sunday September 30, 2012 @09:45AM

Techmeology writes: "Emails and texts sent from UK ministers' private accounts could be subject to the Freedom of Information Act, which means copies could be requested by members of the public. New guidelines to be released by the government say that the key factor is "the nature of the information and not the format". This development comes amid a two year dispute caused when a newspaper used the act to obtain and publish an email sent from the education minister's private email address."

Submission + - PlaceRaider - Your Phone Can Steal A 3D Model Of Your Location (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk on Sunday September 30, 2012 @08:21AM

mikejuk writes: Your phone can now be hijacked by malware to take photos of your surroundings and allow an attacker to build a 3D model from the data. Once built, the model lets an attacker wander round as if they were there.
The US Naval Surface Warfare Center working with Indiana University has just worked out how to infect a mobile phone with a Trojan, (http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.5982v1) PlaceRaider, that can take photos without you knowing anything about it and send sensor data back to a server. To minimize the number of photos sent the app only picks the best taken from any particular viewpoint. Back at the server the photos are used to construct a 3D model which can be used not only to perform the reconnaissance necessary to break in, but also to steal confidential information such as bank details from any documents that might be visible on a table. The 3D model is much easier to explore than the original set of disorganized photos and lets the thief find what they are looking for as if they were actually in the room.
You might find the idea worrying but you have to admire the engineering and it might even have some positive applications.

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