57449415
submission
coondoggie writes:
don't recall ever hearing about as many disastrous sinkholes as I have in the past couple of years — the most recent swallowing up a bunch of Chevrolet Corvettes in a museum in Kentucky. The trend no doubt hasn't been lost on the country's best and brightest scientists and NASA for example now says it has evidence that using one of its aircraft-deployed radar systems it can foresee sinkholes before they happen, decreasing danger to people and property.
57417303
submission
coondoggie writes:
NASA said today that the Hubble Space Telescope snapped what the agency called a never-before-seen break-up of an asteroid in mid-space. The asteroid, designated P/2013 R3 has broken into as many as ten smaller pieces , each with a comet -like tail, that NASA says are drifting away from each other at a leisurely 1.5 kilometers per hour — slower than the speed of a strolling human.
57382917
submission
coondoggie writes:
In the security business one can never have enough trust. And one government group now wants your help in developing a software program that could help decide who's trustworthy and who isn't. A $50,000 software competition announced recently by the Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity (IARPA) group is looking to the public to develop what it calls an "algorithm that identifies and extracts such signals from data recorded while volunteers engaged in various types of trust activities."
57378751
submission
coondoggie writes:
SDNs have gone from concept to reality. Users that were listening to vendor and researcher pitches on the benefits of software-defined networking at Open Networking Summit just a few years ago have taken over the dais and are now sharing their initial implementation experiences. Virtually all of those virtualization experiences are from service providers that have urgent requirements to make their networks more agile and automated in order to turn up new services that are the lifeblood of their business.
57373699
submission
coondoggie writes:
Not that it was against the movie, but NASA has jumped on the outer-space blockbuster bandwagon “Gravity” after it won seven Academy Awards this week. The space agency posted a bunch of pictures and congratulatory videos directed at the makers and actors in the movie. Here’s a look at what NASA said and some of other interesting things about the movie.
57338279
submission
coondoggie writes:
Keeping the mainframe relevant to newer, younger generations of budding IT workers as been an IBM strategy for years — a largely successful one at that according to most experts. Big Blue today announced another component of that plan with the IBM Master the Mainframe World Championship competition — a program that looks to gather the best university students from around the globe, who have demonstrated superior technical skills through participation in their regional IBM Master the Mainframe Contests and reward them with prizes.
57157977
submission
coondoggie writes:
The Federal Trade Commission today issued its annual look at what consumers in the United States are complaining about the most. And for the 14th consecutive year the winner, or loser really, for 2013 was identity theft, receiving over 290,000 or 14% of the agency’s 2 million overall complaints. Thirty percent of these incidents were tax- or wage-related, which continues to be the largest category within identity theft complaints, the FTC stated.
57123915
submission
coondoggie writes:
How bad can cyberattacks get? How about burning the internal components of a machine, whether PC or Mac, to a crisp so there's no thought of it being recoverable? That's what security vendor CrowdStrike showed could be done to an Apple Mac OS X today at the RSA Conference. “We can actually set the machine on fire,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, chief technology officer at CrowdStrike....
57108957
submission
coondoggie writes:
Three principal US national labs today affirmed they will team-up to build supercomputers that operate about 10 times faster than today's most powerful high performance computing (HPC) systems. The project, known as the Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne and Livermore (CORAL) national labs will build 200 peak petaflops (quadrillions of floating point operations per second) systems for each of the labs, at a cost of about $125 million each, in the 2017-2018 timeframe, the group stated.
57062953
submission
coondoggie writes:
The International Space Station recently took a snapshot of the Korean peninsula that explicitly details the night-time power consumption of North and South Korea — North Korea is almost completely dark.
57025459
submission
coondoggie writes:
Few things can mess up a highly technical system and threaten lives like a counterfeit electronic component, yet the use of such bogus gear is said to be widespread. A new Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program will target these phony products and develop a tool to "verify, without disrupting or harming the system, the trustworthiness of a protected electronic component."
56928683
submission
coondoggie writes:
Gaining significant knowledge from the growing tons of information available about big picture topics such as biology, economics, astronomy, health or climate is a challenge beyond most human minds and computer programs. But the scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) want to change that with a program called Big Mechanisms they say could gather all exiting data about a particular topic, keep it up-to-date and develop new conclusions or research directions.
56916409
submission
coondoggie writes:
Everybody wants your money – the IRS too, but at least they will take it legally. The IRS however doesn't want your money taken by scamsters who use tax season to celebrate Christmastime for dirtbags. The list of nastyscams sounds familiar – with identity theft and phone fraud leading the way as they have for the past few years.
56892375
submission
coondoggie writes:
The European Space Agency this week said it was putting together a new space telescope that would take aim at discovering habitable exoplanets in our solar system. By integrating 34 separate small telescopes and cameras, the Planetary Transits and Oscillations of stars, or PLATO, will be parked about 1.5 million km beyond Earth and monitor what the ESA called "relatively nearby stars, searching for tiny, regular dips in brightness as their planets transit in front of them, temporarily blocking out a small fraction of the starlight. "
56885823
submission
coondoggie writes:
Microsoft's Lync communications platform gathers enough readily analyzable data to let corporations spy on their employees like the NSA can on U.S. citizens, and it's based on the same type of information — call details. At Microsoft’s Lync 2014 conference, software developer Event Zero detailed just how easy it would be, for instance, to figure out who is dating whom within the company and pinpoint people looking for another job.
