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Earth

What Caused a 1300-Year Deep Freeze? 258

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the should-have-discovered-coal-earlier dept.
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Things were looking up for Earth about 12,800 years ago. The last Ice Age was coming to an end, mammoths and other large mammals romped around North America, and humans were beginning to settle down and cultivate wild plants. Then, suddenly, the planet plunged into a deep freeze, returning to near-glacial temperatures for more than a millennium before getting warm again. The mammoths disappeared at about the same time, as did a major Native American culture that thrived on hunting them. A persistent band of researchers has blamed this apparent disaster on the impact of a comet or asteroid, but a new study concludes that the real explanation for the chill, at least, may lie strictly with Earth-bound events."

Submission + - VESA Standards Group Adds Adaptive-Sync' DisplayPort Video Standard (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Over the past nine months, we've seen the beginnings of a revolution in how video games are displayed. First, Nvidia demoed G-Sync, its proprietary technology for ensuring smooth frame delivery. Then AMD demoed its own free standard, dubbed FreeSync, that showed a similar technology. Now, VESA (Video Electronics Standard Association) has announced support for "Adaptive Sync," as an addition to DisplayPort. The new capability will debut with DisplayPort 1.2a. The goal of these technologies is to synchronize output from the GPU and the display to ensure smooth output. When this doesn't happen, the display will either stutter due to a mismatch of frames (if V-Sync is enabled) or may visibly tear if V-Sync is disabled. Adaptive Sync is the capability that will allow a DisplayPort 1.2a-compatible monitor and video card to perform FreeSync without needing the expensive ASIC that characterizes G-Sync. You'll still need a DP1.2a cable, monitor, and video card (DP1.2a monitors are expected to ship year end). Unlike G-Sync, a DP1.2a monitor shouldn't cost any additional money, however. The updated ASICs being developed by various vendors will bake the capability in by default.

Submission + - May 1978, at the birth of spam (kingofgng.com)

Submitted by KingofGnG
KingofGnG writes: Before growing into a worldwide phenomenon run by the worst cyber-criminals gangs out there, spam was an annoyance limited to the few intimate users of the ARPANET network. It was there, before the technology at the foundation of ARPANET gave life to the modern Internet, that 36 years ago the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) marketing manager Gary Thuerk sent what is officially acknowledged as the first mass marketing e-mail in history.
The Courts

Judge Tells Feds To Be More Specific About Email Search Warrants 41

Posted by Soulskill from the get-what-you-need,-not-what-you-want dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In yet another example of the judicial branch of the government becoming more critical of federal mass acquisition of personal data, federal magistrate judge John Facciola in D.C. 'denied a government warrant request to search an unnamed user's @mac.com e-mail address, citing the request as being overbroad.' The judge further noted (PDF), 'While it is evident from closely reading the Application and its attachments what the government is really after, it is equally evident that the government is using language that has the potential to confuse the provider—in this case Apple—which must determine what information must be given to the government. This Court should not be placed in the position of compelling Apple to divine what the government actually seeks. Until this Application is clarified, it will be denied.'"
Security

Malware Attack Infected 25,000 Linux/UNIX Servers 220

Posted by Soulskill from the sudo-configure-your-stuff-properly dept.
wiredmikey writes "Security researchers from ESET have uncovered a widespread attack campaign that has infected more than 25,000 Linux and UNIX servers around the world. The servers are being hijacked by a backdoor Trojan as part of a campaign the researchers are calling 'Operation Windigo.' Once infected, victimized systems are leveraged to steal credentials, redirected web traffic to malicious sites and send as many as 35 million spam messages a day. 'Windigo has been gathering strength, largely unnoticed by the security community, for more than two and a half years and currently has 10,000 servers under its control,' said Pierre-Marc Bureau, security intelligence program manager at ESET, in a statement.

There are many misconceptions around Linux security, and attacks are not something only Windows users need to worry about. The main threats facing Linux systems aren't zero-day vulnerabilities or malware, but things such as Trojanized applications, PHP backdoors, and malicious login attempts over SSH. ESET recommends webmasters and system administrators check their systems to see if they are compromised, and has published a detailed report presenting the findings and instructions on how to remove the malicious code if it is present."

Submission + - How Do You See Gravitational Waves?

Submitted by szotz
szotz writes: Three words: superconducting bolometric polarimeters. This article over at IEEE Spectrum breaks down the technology that enabled BICEP2 to see the signature of gravity waves in the cosmic microwave background. Among other things, the detector used "transition edge sensors" that ride the fine line between superconductivity and normal resistive operation.

The detectors are at the apex of their sensitivity. At this point, the author writes, they're "limited by the shot noise of the incoming photons: even if the temperature of a spot on the sky stays perfectly stable, the number of photons hitting the detector will fluctuate over time due to statistics simply because there's a finite number of them."
Firefox

Firefox 28 Arrives With VP9 Video Decoding, HTML5 Volume Controls 142

Posted by Soulskill from the onward-and-upward dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla today officially launched Firefox 28 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Additions include VP9 video decoding, Web notifications on OS X, and volume controls for HTML5 video and audio. Firefox 28 has been released over on Firefox.com and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. The full release notes are available. As always, the Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play (Android release notes)." Mozilla also announced tools to bring the Unity game engine to WebGL and asm.js.

Submission + - Target Ignored Signs of Data Breach (informationweek.com)

Submitted by puddingebola
puddingebola writes: Target ignored indications from it's threat-detection tools that malware had infected it's network. From the article, "Unusually for a retailer, Target was even running its own security operations center in Minneapolis, according to a report published Thursday by Bloomberg Businessweek. Among its security defenses, following a months-long testing period and May 2013 implementation, was software from attack-detection firm FireEye, which caught the initial November 30 infection of Target's payment system by malware. All told, up to five "malware.binary" alarms reportedly sounded, each graded at the top of FireEye's criticality scale, and which were seen by Target's information security teams first in Bangalore, and then Minneapolis." Unfortunately, it appears Target's security team failed to act on the threat indicators.

Submission + - Nanoscale terahertz optical switch breaks miniaturization barrier (vanderbilt.edu) 1

Submitted by Science_afficionado
Science_afficionado writes: There is a general consensus that ultimately photons will replace electrons running through wires in most of our microelectronic devices. One of the current technical barriers to the spread of optoelectronics has been the difficulty in miniaturizing the ultrafast optical switches required. Now a team of physicists at Vanderbilt has made terahertz optical switches out of nanoparticles of vanadium dioxide, a material long known for its ability to rapidly change phase between metallic to semiconducting states. They report in the Mar. 12 issue of Nano Letters that they have created individually addressable switches that are 200 nm in diameter and can switch between transparent and opaque states at terahertz rates.

Submission + - World's Most Efficient Solar Cell Unveiled by French-German Team (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by oritonic1
oritonic1 writes: In the increasingly fast-paced race to create the most efficient solar cell possible, a team comprised of French and German companies has created a unique design that yields 44.7% efficiency, beating the previous record set by Sharp just three months ago. The multi-junction cell, created for use in concentrator photovoltaics, was developed in a little over three years, and its creators hope to reach 50% efficiency by 2015.
The Internet

Ship Anchor, Not Sabotaging Divers, Possibly Responsible For Outage 43

Posted by samzenpus from the who's-to-blame dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes "This week, Egypt caught three men in the process of severing an undersea fiber-optic cable. But Telecom Egypt executive manager Mohammed el-Nawawi told the private TV network CBC that the reason for the region's slowdowns was not the alleged saboteurs — it was damage previously caused by a ship. On March 22, cable provider Seacom reported a cut in its Mediterranean cable connecting Southern and Eastern Africa, the Middle East and Asia to Europe; it later suggested that the most likely cause of the incident was a ship anchor, and that traffic was being routed around the cut, through other providers. But repairs to the cable took longer than expected, with the Seacom CEO announcing March 23 that the physical capability to connect additional capacity to services in Europe was "neither adequate nor stable enough," and that it was competing with other providers. The repairs continued through March 27, after faults were found on the restoration system; that same day, Seacom denied that the outage could have been the work of the Egyptian divers, but said that the true cause won't be known for weeks. 'We think it is unlikely that the damage to our system was caused by sabotage,' the CEO wrote in a statement. 'The reasons for this are the specific location, distance from shore, much greater depth, the presence of a large anchored vessel on the fault site which appears to be the cause of the damage and other characteristics of the event.'"
The Military

United States Begins Flying Stealth Bombers Over South Korea 567

Posted by samzenpus from the nice-day-for-a-flight dept.
skade88 writes "The New York Times is reporting that the United States has started flying B-2 stealth bomber runs over South Korea as a show of force to North Korea. The bombers flew 6,500 miles to bomb a South Korean island with mock explosives. Earlier this month the U.S. Military ran mock B-52 bombing runs over the same South Korean island. The U.S. military says it shows that it can execute precision bombing runs at will with little notice needed. The U.S. also reaffirmed their commitment to protecting its allies in the region. The North Koreans have been making threats to turn South Korea into a sea of fire. North Korea has also made threats claiming they will nuke the United States' mainland."

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 599

by HoleShot (#42294557) Attached to: Why <em>The Hobbit's</em> 48fps Is a Good Thing

I agree with this, Motion Blur is not desirable. In real life you see everything with no motion blur. The old motion picture standard was picked based on economics. It was the slowest frame rate the film industry could use but still trick most peoples minds into thinking it was fluid motion. Keep in mind how film motion pictures work, one frame, (a still shot) moves in front of the light source, the shutter opens you see the still, the shutter closes, you see nothing, (a time of darkness,) the next frame moves in front of the light source, the shutter opens you see the still frame, and so on and so on, 24 times a second. Now on an old TV screen the picture never blanked out, it was supposed to persist until the next frame, so that the image would not be perceived as flickering. I was a TV technician for 20 years, and believe me if you wanted motion blur, old time TV was what you needed. Motion blur was depended on to prevent people from complaining about flicker. TV companies made TV screens with different degrees of persistence to try and balance fluid motion, (how we see real life,) with motion blur (compromised image to reduce flicker.) Give me fluid motion in a motion picture, for that you need frame rate. I am not sure but I think digital projectors work more like a big TV, as they have no shutters, they just paint over the previous frame, like TV does in its digital 30 fps mode. I think 60fps would be very good, 120fps might be over kill.

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