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Science

Submission + - Bees Communicate with Electric Fields (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: The electric fields that build up on honey bees as they fly, flutter their wings, or rub body parts together may allow the insects to talk to each other, a new study suggests. Tests show that the electric fields, which can be quite strong, deflect the bees' antennae, which, in turn, provide signals to the brain through specialized organs at their bases. Antenna deflections induced by an electrically charged honey bee wing are about 10 times the size of those that would be caused by airflow from the wing fluttering at the same distance—a sign that electrical fields could be an important signal.

Submission + - Cold Spring Linked to Dramatic Sea Ice Loss (wunderground.com) 1

Submitted by hrvatska
hrvatska writes: An article at wunderground.com reports that researchers have linked large snowstorms and cold spring weather across Britain and large parts of Europe and North America to the dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice. It is thought that the Arctic ice loss adds heat to the ocean and atmosphere, which shifts the position of the jet stream allowing cold air from the Arctic to plunge much further south. Researchers expect that a warming Arctic ocean will drive more extreme weather in North America and Europe.
Canada

Submission + - Warrants required for text messages (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by Beardo the Bearded
Beardo the Bearded writes: The Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) has ruled that your text messages cannot be seized without a wiretap order.

FTA: "The decision overturns a lower court ruling against Telus that required the company to hand over copies of two of its customers' text messages after it was served with a general warrant by police in Owen Sound, Ontario.

Telus had appealed the ruling. The phone provider argued that seizing the messages would constitute "interception" of the communication and would therefore require a wiretap warrant. That is more difficult to get than a general warrant, because of special privacy provisions in the Criminal Code protecting private communications."

Submission + - GCHQ attempts to downplay amazing plaintext password blunder (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by
iComp
iComp writes: "Red-faced crypto and intercept intelligence agency GCHQ has admitted emailing plain text password reminders to people who register on its careers micro-site.

The issue came to light after prospective job applicant Dan Farrall blogged about his experience of receiving a plain text reminder of his GCHQ recruitment site password by email after filling out its forgotten password form. Farrall only got round to blogging about the issue this week, two months after the offending email.

Incredibly the signals intelligence agency had done nothing in the weeks in-between to address such well understood security bad practice on its careers site.

Website passwords should be stored by organisations only as encrypted and salted hashes. And password reminders shouldn't be sent in unencrypted emails. Instead it's far better to apply a password reset procedure. Password retrieval isn't even possible where login credentials are stored only as encrypted and salted hashes, so it's evident that in this case they weren't."
Open Source

Submission + - Global Enterprises Increase Linux Adoption in Critical Growth Areas (linuxfoundation.org) 1

Submitted by
jrepin
jrepin writes: "Key findings from this year’s report show the world’s largest enterprises are increasing their investments in Linux for the third consecutive year. Industry reports for the most recent quarter (4Q12) show that while overall server revenue is only growing at 3.1 percent year-over-year; Linux experienced 12.7 percent year-over-year growth for the quarter while Windows only increased 3.2 percent and UNIX was down 24.1 percent. The Enterprise End User Report helps to inform the industry about what is driving this adoption and how market growth is shaping up for the future."
Cellphones

Submission + - North Korea Halts Internet Access After One Month (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by
redletterdave
redletterdave writes: "After just one month online, North Korea has pulled the plug on its only 3G data network, which was previously made available for tourists to access the Internet starting on Feb. 22. The North Korean government did not explain why its 3G network has been shut off, but given the raised level of international interest in the country’s activities (the country is facing UN sanctions after its third nuclear test last month) and how it severed its final communication line with South Korea on Wednesday, the government likely had a change of heart about its loosening communication restrictions. That said, as with most things in North Korea, we may never know the real answer."

Comment Re:Poor decisions lately Mr. Shuttleworth? (Score 5, Informative) 171

by Zamphatta (#43242603) Attached to: Canonical and China Announce Ubuntu Collaboration
Couldn't agree more! If not for Ubuntu, I'd probably still be stuck with Windows. I tried installing Debian, a couple other distros, and FreeBSD. When they worked out fine, I found it was all command line and I had a hard time getting online & installing Gnome, Cinnamon, Xfce, or KDE. So I just stuck with Ubuntu. I'd really love to get into FreeBSD, but hey... I'm just a web developer, I don't need to spend a lot of my time trying to get my system to work and I don't want to spend a lot of my time on that either. I often think part of the reason Linux isn't more popular is because it almost always requires the Linux newbie to learn the hard way first, in order to use the system in a more intuitive way (GUI). And when there's OS's like Windows & Mac, that don't require the hard way to be the 1st thing you learn, then why waste the time going through all the hoops? That's how I see it. That's what held me back for about 12 years.

Comment Must Say (Score 2) 183

by Zamphatta (#43105691) Attached to: Chrome, Firefox, IE 10, Java, Win 8 All Hacked At Pwn2Own
The article points out that the hacks were done on Windows & Mac's. So simply saying "oh, these browsers are all flawed", is suggesting something that is either not true or something unknown. After all, it's entirely possible that the flaws do not exist in Linux or non-Mac-BSD versions of the browsers. I've seen articles go on like this before... about how all the browsers are hackable, but they only really know (or mean) that all the browsers are hackable on a certain platform. I'm tired of that FUD.

Comment Ridiculous! (Score 1) 573

by Zamphatta (#43034995) Attached to: Time Warner Cable: No Consumer Demand For Gigabit Internet
Time-Warner's about to be caught off guard and fall behind the industry, as the decade progresses. It's absolutely silly to claim that with the growth of online video, people aren't also increasingly interested in better upload/download speed. Also, I've been a Time-Warner customer since the 90's, and I haven't gotten anything from TW in my mail about service tiers. I only discovered they offered different level of services when I Googled a couple weeks ago. Why did I Google? 'cause I was wondering why my upload speed was insanely slow. I'm sure other customers are more aware of the service tiers TW offers, but if I wasn't informed, then how many others are clueless too? I'd be willing to bet that the lack of people signing up for their top tier, is less due to demand and more due to ignorance. When I say ignorance, I'm talkin' about two things -- not knowing there are options, and not understanding the options (some consumers just don't understand how much 1GB really is, etc).

Comment How Long? (Score 1) 418

by Zamphatta (#43019969) Attached to: Six-Strikes System Starts In U.S.
I love this. I'm curious to see how long it'll be before some user who gets 6 strikes, actually sues their ISP for penalizing the customer without having signed a contract agreeing to this system. I'm just waiting for it. I'm sure there's other problems about it which customers could sue over, but the fact this is a huge change in service without customer's consent (thus changing the contract between the consumer & service provider), should be tested or addressed in court.

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