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Moon

The New Moon Race 212

Posted by Zonk from the make-the-jump dept.
An anonymous reader writes "News.com has a pictoral and editorial look at the quickly-heating second race to the moon. A Japanese orbital probe is expected to reach orbit of the satellite sometime today, just one of the dozens of projects now aiming to exploit Earth's orbital partner for scientific and business gains. 'The next lunar visitor may come from China. The Chang'e-1 spacecraft is scheduled to lift off near the end of October. It is slated to study the moon's topography in 3D and also investigate its elements. Chang'e-3 is a soft lunar lander that is scheduled to fly in 2010 ... If all goes as planned, the United States and India will have astronauts on the moon by 2020, China by 2022, and Japan and Russia by 2025.'"
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Russian "Father of All Bombs" = Fake? (wired.com) 1

Submitted by
mytrip
mytrip writes: "Remember Russia's "Father of All Bombs," reportedly the most powerful thermobaric weapon in the world? Turns out it's at least partially a fraud. I've got the scoop over at Wired News:

Father of All Bombs "has no match in the world," a military officer boasts in the official video. ... But close analysis of the video reveals inconsistencies that have led some U.S. experts to question the veracity of the Russian claims, and to downgrade assessments of the weapon. It's possible, they say, that the video was partially faked, and that the test was hyped for political reasons.

The Father of All Bombs, as shown, would not fit in a Tu-160's bomb bay, as it features a horizontally deploying drogue parachute that would be fouled by the aircraft if released vertically."
Censorship

Submission + - Blogger threatened for publishing JavaScript hack

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Internet radio station Atlanta Blue Skye LLC has warned a Romania-based technology enthusiast that his blog has been "copied" and turned over to its lawyers. The issue stems from his posting of a widely known workaround for bypassing JavaScript functions that try to disable a mouse's right-click context menu functionality, and the radio stream information gathered from the Properties function of Windows Media Player.
Power

Submission + - S3 Standby State Done Right

Submitted by
Cameron Butterfield
Cameron Butterfield writes: "Because of increasing awareness in the general public about energy conservation, the ability to utilize low power states on desktop PCs is incredibly underdocumented and widely unused. My goal with this article is to change all that, to help computer users everywhere utilize these low power states without losing any original functionality of their network drives or remote applications. Heck, if you follow this guide, you may even be able to save a buck or two in the process. This article will attempt to answer the following:
  • Why bother? Why do I even want to waste my time on this?
  • My computer won't cooperate! How can I enable a S3 standby state which uses a fraction of the power vs. an Always on or a S1 standby state?
  • Now that I have enabled a S3 Standby state, how can I get my computer to wake up without issues?
  • I use my computer as an always on a file server / remote desktop / vnc machine. Can I actually take advantage of low power sleep states? I need access to my files at all times!

The link to this article is here: http://www.exoid.com/?p=29

Please give it a read and please consider posting the link on slashdot.
Thank you.
-Cameron Butterfield"
Software

Submission + - When Developers Attack

Submitted by
Rhymes With Trouble
Rhymes With Trouble writes: "What do you do when you fork your project and the users shun the new application and keep using the old one? The Freenet Project has had an ongoing problem where many of the users have kept using the older 0.5 network because it was stable and had Open Net while the new 0.7 network was slow, buggy, and difficult to connect to. The Freenet developers Zothar and Nextgens decided that they should attack and destroy the old network instead of making the new network more stable and easier to use. The following is an IRC chat between two of the Freenet developers. " [20:12:25] Zothar_Work> I need to talk about bringing 0.5 down with toad [20:12:38] Zothar_Work> I've got some ideas on how to do it [20:12:52] that would definitly shut up 0.5 trolls, wouldn't it ? [20:14:08] nextgens: yeah, that would probably do it [20:14:13] censoring at hand? [20:14:24] it's not about censoring [20:14:30] I find it interesting that Frost on 0.5 doesn't seem to be having the board spoofing problem 0.7 does [20:14:36] it's about prooving that 0.5 has to be replaced :) [20:14:43] FuriousRage: vulnerability demonstration [20:15:19] that would be indirect "settling" " When asked to condem this action, the primary developer Matthew Toseland (Toad) remained silent."
Space

Submission + - Microsoft Billionaire Simonyi Lands After Trip

Submitted by jjj30337
jjj30337 writes: From Bloomberg — Charles Simonyi, whose two decades as a software developer at Microsoft Corp. made him a billionaire, returned to Earth today, two weeks after blasting off to become the world's fifth space tourist.

Hungarian-born Simonyi, 58, landed in Kazakhstan today at 6:31 p.m. local time, images broadcast live on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's online television station showed. He was accompanied by NASA Commander Michael Lopez- Alegria and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin, who had spent a record 215 days at the International Space Station.

— You can read more about his adventure in outer space here (flash warning)
Security

Submission + - New Details On OS X Bug: Firefox Also Vulnerable

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: More details have emerged about the MacOS X vulnerability Dino Dai Zovi developed to win the $10,000 CanSec PWN-2-0WN challenge; contrary to CNet's report, the vulnerability involves Java applets, and affects FireFox as well as Safari. MacOS X users can disable Java support in their browsers to mitigate the vulnerability.

http://www.matasano.com/log/806/hot-off-the-matasa no-sms-queue-cansec-macbook-challenge-won/
The Internet

Submission + - Logging My Life - Project Life Logger

Submitted by coolfrog
coolfrog writes: Gordon Bell has been recording every bit of his life for the past seven years. His custom-designed software, "MyLifeBits" saves everything it can, from every email he sends and receives, every document he types, every chat session he engages in, every Web page he surfs. The advantages of such a software are obvious: total recall. It gives one the ability to search ones life for any reference of a person/thing. Inspired by it I have decided to start logging my life as well. As of now its restricted to only my online life as I do not have resources like the SenseCam. The data collected in this process could be used in numerous ways: total recall, recommendations, predictions, and so on. As Peter Norvig says, "Its about the data and not the algorithm". Head over to the Life Logger project page, where I am documenting how I have been logging my life along with tools and algorithms for aggregating and analyzing such data. Happy logging :-)
Google

Submission + - Google's Froogle gets renamed to Product Search

Submitted by
priestx
priestx writes: "Google Inc. has renamed its "Froogle" product display and search system to "Google Product Search." Google's Froogle was one of the company's earliest moves into offering a search system for products that would allow Google to connect a buyer and seller directly outside of the text ads displayed on its market-leading web search engine."
Communications

Global Positioning Without GPS 82

Posted by kdawson from the where-we-are dept.
GadgetMike sends word of an award to Boeing for work on a Robust Positioning System that could make use of cell signals, television transmissions, and other clues to provide position information when GPS is unavailable. (Wonder if they've heard about Skyhook Wireless, which does a similar job based on Wi-Fi hotspots, for 2500 US cities and towns.) The work is being sponsored by the US military, so it's not surprising that they don't want to rely on upcoming GPS enhancers or replacements from France, China, and Russia. Here is the Boeing press release.
NASA

Submission + - Gunman Kills at NASA

Submitted by
Bizzeh
Bizzeh writes: "
A gunman has killed a male hostage and himself during a stand-off at Nasa's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

Police, who had surrounded the scene and entered when they heard a gunshot, also found a second hostage, a woman, who was alive but tied up with tape.
Full story at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6578167. stm"
Communications

Submission + - The man behind the Nigerian SMS system UPDATED

Submitted by
kiwanja
kiwanja writes: "SORRY — FORGOT THE LINK IN THE LAST POSTING SO RE-SENDING

Greetings from Stanford University!

I've been working on mobile technology issues in developing countries for some time, and developed an SMS system in 2005 which has only this week been used to help monitor the Nigerian elections. The story broke on BBC News Online and I'm giving an interview to the BBC World Service on Monday. The story has also been posted in your Politics section. That link is http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/ 21/0646229&from=rss

I gave an in depth interview about my work to Mongabay.com only last week — it covers the use of mobile technology in conservation and development work. With the sudden increased exposure, this is a kind-of interview with the man behind the Nigerian elections SMS software. The interview is at http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0416-banks_interview .html

Thought it might be interesting to your readers.

Thanks.

Ken Banks, www.kiwanja.net"
United States

Submission + - Kremlin Gag Order Issued to Russian Journalists

Submitted by
reporter
reporter writes: "In a shocking report, "The New York Times" states, "At their first meeting with journalists since taking over Russia's largest independent radio news network, the managers had startling news of their own: from now on, they said, at least 50 percent of the reports about Russia must be 'positive.' In addition, opposition leaders could not be mentioned on the air and the United States was to be portrayed as an enemy , journalists employed by the network, Russian News Service, say they were told by the new managers, who are allies of the Kremlin." Will the Kremlin now resurrect the Ministry of Truth?"
Security

Submission + - Fully updated OSX Box Hacked

Submitted by
Guanine
Guanine writes: "The security blog Matasano Chargen recently reported that at the CanSecWest Applied Security Conference, a MacBook Pro with all the latest patches was successfully hacked. A vulnerability and exploit in Safari were developed by Dino Dai Zovi, then leveraged by Shane MacCauley to "get a shell with user level privilages." The reward is $10,000 and the hacked MacBook Pro."
Security

Submission + - Researchers win $10000 in OS X Security Challenge

Submitted by crackman
crackman writes: Today at the CanSecWest security conference, Shane Macaulay demonstrated a client side vulnerability and exploit developed overnight by Dino Dai Zovi of Matasano Security to win the PWN 2 0WN contest. The pair walks away with the recently raised bounty of $10000 as well as the MacBook used in the demonstration. Matasano has promised details of the vulnerability will be disclosed at a later date.

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