Daravon - Slashdot User

Emacs Hits Version 23 367

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 30, 2009 @03:29PM from the actually-includes-duke-nukem-forever dept.

djcb writes "After only 2 years since the previous version, now emacs 23 (.1) is available. It brings many new features, of which the support for anti-aliased fonts on X may be the most visible. Also, there is support for starting emacs in the background, so you can pop up new emacs windows in the blink of an eye. There are many other bigger and smaller improvements, including support for D-Bus, Xembed, and viewing PDFs inside emacs. And not to forget, M-x butterfly. You can get emacs 23 from ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/ or one of its mirrors; alternatively, there are binary packages available, for example from Ubuntu PPA."

Submission + - SPAM: A.I. developer challenges pro-human bias

Submitted by

destinyland

on Thursday July 30, 2009 @03:27PM

destinyland writes: "After 13 years, the creator of the Noble Ape cognitive simulation says he's learned two things about artificial intelligence. "Survival is a far better metric of intelligence than replicating human intelligence," and "There are a number of examples of vastly more intelligent systems (in terms of survival) than human intelligence." Both Apple and Intel have used his simulation as a processor metric, but now Tom Barbalet argues its insights could be broadly applied to real life. His examples of durable non-human systems? The legal system, the health care system, and even the internet, where individual humans are simply the "passive maintaining agents," and the systems can't be conquered without a human onslaught that's several magnitudes larger."
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Latest practical attacks on AES-256 (blogspot.com)

Submitted by

xizhi.zhu

on Thursday July 30, 2009 @03:10PM

xizhi.zhu writes: "As blogged by Schneier, there is another new attack against AES-256. This new attack can break AES-256 of 9 rounds at the time 2^39, AES-256 of 10 rounds at time 2^45, and AES-256 of 11 rounds at time 2^70. Note that the full AES-256 has 14 rounds. However, this attack requires the cryptanalyst to have access to plain-texts encrypted with multiple keys that are related in a specific way. Also, Schneier suggests AES-128 at 16 rounds, AES-192 at 20 rounds, and AES-256 at 28 rounds."

Submission + - Malaria vaccine: via mosquito

Submitted by

CodeShark

on Thursday July 30, 2009 @02:39PM

CodeShark writes: "The AP is reporting that mosquitoes have been used for the first time to deliver anti-malarial "vaccine" through their bites. According to this article the results were crystal clear: 100% of the vaccinated group acquired immunity, everyone in the non-vaccinated control group did not. Those in the control group and developed malaria when exposed to the parasites later, the vaccinated group did not.

Malaria kills nearly a million people per year, mostly children. Compared to any injection regimen, if this technology comes to fruition, could this be the end to a dreaded killer?"

Submission + - Chicago City Council approves solar plant (chicagoist.com)

Submitted by

ssintercept

on Thursday July 30, 2009 @02:21PM

ssintercept writes: "The Chicago City Council approved a 25 year land lease to Exelon Corp. and SunPower Corp. yesterday, to build a 40 acre solar power plant on the polluted and vacant International Harvester plant, in Chicago's South side West Pullman neighborhood. Brian Granahan, a spokesman for Environment Illinois, told the Daily Herald. "This has gotten a lot of support to both get rid of an eyesore and expand renewable energy." The project is expected to create 200 jobs from the construction, although once the plant is operating, only one full-time worker will be employed there. Although Chicago is behind other major cities in terms of renewable energy, is it beneficial to the city, other than a in a 'I feel good that we are saving the planet' way? source http://chicagoist.com/2009/07/30/city_council_approves_land_lease_fo.php"

Submission + - Bootkit bypasses hard disk encryption

Submitted by

Sique

on Thursday July 30, 2009 @12:50PM

Sique writes: "The german technology news site Heise.de reports under the title Bootkit bypasses hard disk encryption: At the Black Hat security conference, Austrian IT security specialist Peter Kleissner presented a bootkit called Stoned which is capable of bypassing the TrueCrypt partition and system encryption. A bootkit combines a rootkit with the ability to modify a PC's Master Boot Record, enabling the malware to be activated even before the operating system is started."

Submission + - HS Student Isolates Polystyrene-eating Microbe (wired.com)

Submitted by

cmholm

on Thursday July 30, 2009 @11:18AM

cmholm writes: "Although I had for years assumed that plastics eventually biodegrade, my recent reading of Weisman's The World Without Us reminded me that just because garbage has broken down into pieces that I can't see doesn't mean it isn't still polluting the biosphere. Weisman's book suggests that we're pretty much stuck with most plastics until something evolves to eat them. Perhaps we just need to introduce the diner to the dinner. A Waterloo, Ontario teen's 2008 science fair experiment found polystyrene's match in the team of the relatively uncommon Sphingomonas and Pseudomonas bacterias. At 37 degrees and optimal bacterial concentration, with a bit of sodium acetate thrown in, Burd achieved 43 per cent degradation within six weeks, rather than thousands of years."

Submission + - emacs 23 has been released (blogspot.com)

Submitted by djcb on Thursday July 30, 2009 @05:38AM

djcb writes: After only 2 years since the previous version, now emacs 23 (.1) is available. It brings many new features, of which the support for anti-aliased fonts on X may be the most visible. Also, there is support for starting emacs in the background, so you can pop up new emacs windows in the blink of an eye. There are many other bigger and smaller improvements, including support for D-Bus, Xembed, and viewing PDFs inside emacs. And not to forget, M-x butterfly. You can get emacs 23 from ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/ or one of its mirrors; alternatively, there are binary packages available, for example from Ubuntu PPA.

US Supercomputer Lead Sparks Russian Govt's Competitive Drive 74

Posted by timothy on Wednesday July 29, 2009 @02:27PM from the ever-since-that-damn-satellite dept.

CWmike writes "Russia's launch of Sputnik in 1957 triggered a crisis of confidence in the US that helped drive the creation of a space program. Now, Russia is comparing the US's achievements in supercomputing with theirs, and they don't like what they see. In a speech on Tuesday, Russia's President, Dmitry Medvedev, criticized his country's IT industry almost to the point of sarcasm for failing to develop supercomputing technology, and urged a dramatic change in Russia's use of high-performance computing. Medvedev, at the opening address of a Security Council Meeting on Supercomputers in Moscow, told attendees that 476 out of the 500 supercomputers on the Top500 list were manufactured in the United States. 'Therefore, in general, our situation is very difficult,' he said."

Submission + - Update on Electrosensitivity: It's a PR stunt! 1

Submitted by the_humeister on Wednesday July 29, 2009 @09:51AM

the_humeister writes: Arstechnica has an update on the British DJ who claims to be allergic to Wi-Fi signals (this was on Slashdot a few days ago). Apparently the guy has a new album out called Electrosensitivity. Imagine that?

Submission + - Stopping Spam Before it Hits the Mail Server (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

Al

on Wednesday July 29, 2009 @09:32AM

Al writes: "A team of researchers at Georgia Institute for Technology say they have developed a way to catch spam before it even arrives on the mail server. Instead of bothering to analyse the contents of a spam message, their software, called SNARE (Spatio-temporal Network-level Automatic Reputation Engine), examines key aspects of individual packets of data to determine whether it might be spam. The team, led by assistant prof Nick Feamster, analyzed 2.5 million emails collected by McAfee in order to determine the key packet characteristics of spam. These include the geodesic proximity of end mail servers and the number of ports open on the sending machine. The approach catches spam 70 percent of the time, with a 0.3 false positive rate. Of course, revealing these characteristics could also allow spammers to fake their packets to avoid filtering."

Submission + - More errors in competitive research fields

Submitted by Rolgar on Wednesday July 29, 2009 @09:25AM

Rolgar writes: Looking specifically at biology research, two researchers have found that more competitive fields have more errors in data reporting. One important difference between the competitive and non-competitive fields would be that in competitive fields, the scientist is under pressure to to be first, and therefore has an incentive to make the data fit the conclusion, where the non-competitive scientist has more time to complete the research properly. The researchers of this study claim 'Interactions of highly popular proteins tend to be confirmed by high-throughput experiments at much lower frequency than interactions of un-popular proteins.' Surely, competitors would have incentive to replicate and disprove a competitor's experiment, in case the the work was done incorrectly or reported fraudulently. Instead, one foreseeable result could yeild that this leads to a culture of fudging the results of the current study to match those of a previous studies, building a consensus based on series of bad experiments, as some claim is the case with climate studies. This again points to the need for openness in science, but also should call for more diligence about independent confirmation of research results.

Submission + - SPAM: iPhone SMS attack to be unleashed at Black Hat

Submitted by alphadogg on Wednesday July 29, 2009 @08:55AM

alphadogg writes: Apple has just over a day left to patch a bug in it's iPhone software that could let hackers take over the iPhone, just by sending out and SMS message. The bug was discovered by noted iPhone hacker Charlie Miller, who first talked about the issue at the SyScan conference in Singapore. At the time, he said he'd discovered a way to crash the iPhone via SMS, and that he thought that the crash could ultimately lead to working attack code. Since, then he's been working hard, and he now says he's able to take over the iPhone with a series of malicious SMS messages.Miller said he will show how this can be done during a presentation at the Black Hat [spam URL stripped] security conference in Las Vegas this Thursday with security researcher Collin Mulliner.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Gmail to use SMS verification on signup.

Submitted by Sinn3d on Wednesday July 29, 2009 @08:30AM

Sinn3d writes: "Users signing up for a Gmail account are now being asked to provide a mobile-phone number in the continuing war against spam, though Google will keep it handy just in case anything else turns up."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/29/gmail_mobile/

Submission + - Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes (debian.org)

Submitted by frenchbedroom on Wednesday July 29, 2009 @08:27AM

frenchbedroom writes: The ongoing Debconf 9 conference in Cáceres, Spain has brought a significant change to Debian's project management. The Debian project will now freeze development in December of every odd year, which means we can expect a new Debian release in the spring of every even year, starting with "Squeeze" in 2010. Until now, development freezing was decided by the Debian release team. From the announcement :
The project chose December as a suitable freeze date since spring releases proved successful for the releases of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codenamed "Etch") and Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 ("Lenny").

Time-based freezes will allow the Debian Project to blend the predictability of time based releases with its well established policy of feature based releases. The new freeze policy will provide better predictability of releases for users of the Debian distribution, and also allow Debian developers to do better long-term planning. A two-year release cycle will give more time for disruptive changes, reducing inconveniences caused for users. Having predictable freezes should also reduce overall freeze time.

We previously discussed talks between Canonical and the Debian release team about fixed freeze dates.

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