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Privacy

Submission + - Wikipedia Admins. Admit "Private" Checkuse (wikipedia.org) 1

Submitted by wikinerdiest
wikinerdiest writes: This Wikipedia Administrative Board discussion tells it all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Archive114#.22Private.22_Checkuser_use . The admins. secretly and habitually arrange for their Checkuser tool to invade Users' privacy (via so-called "private" requests made to those with the invasive Checkuser status) via back channel email and IRC conversations. The regular Wikipedia users have no idea it's even happening so they can't even complain about a privacy abuse to the token Ombudsman set up on the official Checkuser request page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CHECKUSER which seems to be just a ruse for public reassurance that Checkuser use is a transparent process).
Space

Submission + - Astronauts test sex in space 3

Submitted by Arevazi
Arevazi writes: The Guardian has a story about a book confirming that US and Russian astronauts have had sex in space for research programmes. The book (The Final Mission: Mir, The Human Adventure by Pierre Kohler) cites a confidential Nasa report on a space shuttle mission in 1996. A project codenamed STS-XX was to explore sexual positions possible in a weightless atmosphere. The result: only four positions were found possible without "mechanical assistance". One of the principal findings was that the classic so-called missionary position, which is so easy on earth when gravity pushes one downwards, is simply not possible.
Space

Submission + - Chinese Moon Photo Doctored, Craters Moved (msn.com) 1

Submitted by
mytrip
mytrip writes: "A controversy over last week's photo of the lunar surface, allegedly from China's lunar spacecraft Chang'e, appears to be resolved. It's real but it isn't. An expert says the photo's resolution shows that it is of recent origin. However, for some inexplicable reason, someone on Earth edited the photo and moved a crater to a different location.

Some dogged sleuthing by a fellow space blogger has tracked down the truth behind the controversial first photo from China's moon orbiter.

In the week since the picture was released amid much fanfare in Beijing, there have been widespread rumors that the photo was a fake, copied from an old picture collected by a U.S. space probe.

The photo from China's Chang'e 1 orbiter is clearly a higher-resolution view, with sunlight streaming from the northwest rather than the north.

The mission's chief scientist, Ouyang Ziyuan, told the Beijing News that a new crater had been spotted on the Chang'e imagery — a crater that didn't appear on the U.S. imagery. Lakdawalla determined that crater in question it wasn't exactly new — instead, it appeared to be a crater that had been moved from one spot on the picture to another spot slightly south."
Security

Submission + - California Testers Find Flaws in Voting Machines (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by quanticle
quanticle writes: According to Ars Technica, California testers have discovered severe flaws in the ES&S voting machines. The paper seals were easily bypassed, and the lock could be picked with a "common office implement". After cracking the physical security the device, the testers found it simple to reconfigure the BIOS to boot off external media. After booting a version of Linux, they found that critical system files were stored in plain text. They also found that the election management system that initializes the voting machines used unencrypted protocols to transmit the initialization data to the voting machines, allowing for a man-in-the-middle attack.

Altogether, it is a troubling report for a company already in hot water for selling uncertified equipment to counties.
Communications

Submission + - Ham Radio Operators Are Heroes In Oregon (kptv.com) 1

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: We all know the impact that Ham radio can have in emergencies, but that often slips by the public and the authorities. Not so in Oregon, where a day after getting inundated with torrential rains and winds and suffering from the usually calamities those cause, Oregon's Governor called the local Ham radio operators heroes. When discussing how the storm affected communications, the governor stated: "I'm going to tell you who the heroes were from the very beginning of this...the ham radio operators." Kudos to the Oregon Ham operators for helping out in a bad situation, and getting the recognition they deserve.
Privacy

Submission + - Should we have the right to breed? 11

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: I just finished reading Garret Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons and I'm having a little trouble coming to grips with it. In the essay Hardin argues that in a world with finite resources we must stabilize the population at less than the carrying capacity in order to maintain quality of life. However, "Confronted with appeals to limit breeding, some people will undoubtedly respond to the plea more than others. Those who have more children will produce a larger fraction of the next generation than those with more susceptible consciences. The differences will be accentuated, generation by generation." Hardin therefore suggests that we must legally restrict freedom to breed.

However such restrictions would require a invasion of our privacy to a degree that strikes me as simply intolerable. But I'm curious, what do slashdot readers think? Is Hardin's logic sound? If it is, is controlling the population important enough that we should give up what we have long accepted as some of our most basic rights in order to achieve it?
AMD

Submission + - Errata plagues quad-core Opterons, Phenoms

Submitted by
theraindog
theraindog writes: "Errata are not uncommon with new processors, but a problem with the TLB logic in AMD's quad-core Opteron and Phenom processors appears to be quite serious. The errata is so severe that AMD has issued a "stop ship" order on all quad-core Opterons. AMD has also blamed it for the delay of the 2.4GHz Phenom, despite the fact that the errata is unrelated to clock speed. A BIOS-based workaround for the issue has been made available to motherboard makers, but it apparently carries a 10-20% performance penalty. What's more disturbing is that AMD knew of the errata and the potential performance hit associated with fixing it before it launched the Phenom processor. Hardware provided to the press for reviews did not include the fix, conveniently overstating Phenom performance."
Christmas Cheer

Submission + - The Science of Gift Wrapping (alphagalileo.org)

Submitted by
IZ Reloaded
IZ Reloaded writes: "A mathematician working with a leading shopping centre in the UK has come up with a formula for the perfect method of gift-wrapping. The mathematical solution which will hopefully put an end to unnecessary paper wastage: A1 = 2(ab+ac+bc+c2)**. The length of the wrapping paper should be as long as the perimeter of the side of the gift, with no more than 2cm allowed for an overlap. The width should be just a little over the sum of the width and the depth of the gift. There's also a formula to wrap unusual shaped gift: h/(p-2)***. The equation will help consumers decide whether they should roll the paper around the gift or wrap the paper over the top of it to ensure they reduce their gift-wrapping footprint."
Government

Submission + - British Village Requests Removal from GPS Maps (nytimes.com) 6

Submitted by
longacre
longacre writes: "The tiny village of Barrow Gurney, England has asked GPS map publisher Tele Atlas to remove them from the company's maps. The reason: truck drivers using GPS navigation devices are being directed to drive through the town despite the roads being too narrow for sidewalks, and causing numerous accidents. At the root of the problem lies the fact that the navigation maps used by trucks are the same as those used by passenger cars, which don't contain data on road width or no truck zones. Tele Atlas says they will release truck-appropriate databases at some point, but until then they advise local governments to make use of a technology dating back to the Romans: road signs."
The Courts

Submission + - Lime Wire antitrust claims against RIAA dismissed (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by
NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "The antitrust counterclaims interposed by Lime Wire against the RIAA record companies have been dismissed. In a 45-page decision (pdf), the Court relied principally upon the holding of the United States Supreme Court in Bell Atlantic v. Twombly that "A party's "obligation to provide the grounds of his entitlement to relief requires more than labels and conclusions, and a formulaic recitation of the elements of a cause of action will not do." Ironically, the Twombly decision was the authority upon which the RIAA's copyright infringement complaint was dismissed in Interscope v. Rodriguez."
United States

Submission + - Internet Thought Police Bill Before Congress (news.com) 2

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "A new bill is before congress that is expected to approved and will establish a new federal commission tasked with investigating Americans with "extremist belief systems" and those who may engage in "ideologically based violence." The article also mentions a chilling quote from the bill that has already made it past the House of Representatives (by 404-6):

The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens.
"Extremist belief systems?" <sarcasm>None of that on Slashdot!</sarcasm>"
Sun Microsystems

Submission + - Sun used threats to sieze OpenDNS,owner says (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by
Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward writes: "Sun used strong-arm tactics and made threats to the owners of an open-source directory project to wrestle away control, according to one of the former owners and creators of the project.In the process, Sun potentially has torn a gaping hole in the OpenDS (directory service) project, which is creating a free Java-based directory service for large deployments that offers high performance, extensibility and management. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/112907-sun-opends.html"
The Courts

Submission + - Court orders Bush admin to disclose telecom ties (salon.com)

Submitted by rgiskard01
rgiskard01 writes: From Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com, "The Electronic Frontier Foundation has won another significant legal battle, as a federal judge in California yesterday ordered the Bush administration (.pdf) to comply with EFF's FOIA demand and disclose documents revealing its "communications with telecommunications carriers and members of Congress" regarding efforts to amend FISA and provide amnesty to telecoms."
Story: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/?last_story=/opinion/greenwald/2007/11/29/telecom_lobbying/
Court Order: http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/foia_C0705278/eff_v_odni_order.pdf
Biotech

Submission + - New Nerve Gas Antidotes (wired.com) 1

Submitted by SoyChemist
SoyChemist writes: Scientists from Korea and the Czech Republic have discovered new drugs that can counteract the chemical overload caused by nerve gas. All of the experimental medications belong to a family of chemicals called oximes. Those molecules reactivate the enzyme that is damaged by the chemical weapons. Last year, the FDA approved the first combined atropine and oxime auto-injector for use by emergency personnel. Israel has been providing them to their citizens since the first Gulf War.

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