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Submission + - Human sperm produced in the laboratory (bbc.co.uk) 1

Submitted by duh P3rf3ss3r
duh P3rf3ss3r writes: The BBC is carrying a report from a team of researchers at Newcastle University who claim to have developed the first "artificial" human sperm from stem cells. The research, reported in the journal Stem Cells and Development involved selecting meristematic germ cells from a human embryonic stem cell culture and inducing meiosis, thus producing a haploid gamete. The authors claim that the resulting sperm are fully formed, mature, human sperm cells but the announcement has been greeted with mixed reaction from colleagues who claim the procedure is ethically questionable and that the gametes produced are of inferior levels of maturation.
Security

Submission + - Is there a zero-day OpenSSH exploit in the wild? (dshield.org)

Submitted by eefsee
eefsee writes: sans.org reports 'Over the past 24 hours we've had a number of readers tell us that there is an OpenSSH exploit in active use.' It is not clear if this is a real exploit or sysadmin CYA masquerading as exploit, but some web hosts have already turned of SSH in response. On 7/5 HostGator shut down SSH on all its shared servers. Site5 did the same thing the next day. The loss of SSH, of course, kills SFTP on these hosts as well, forcing customers to fall back on FTP. Now that is security!
Censorship

Submission + - China Pulls the Plug on Facebook (shacknet.nu)

Submitted by
RadioOfficer
RadioOfficer writes: "Recent events in China have clearly raised concerns among the Chinese authorities. Yesterday evening shortly before 8pm, access to Facebook was blocked in Shanghai and Google search was severely curtailed. While Twitter and youTube have been inaccessible in mainland China for some time now, Facebook had escaped a general blockade albeit suffering occasional brief interruptions. The events of yesterday evening have Shanghai residents and ex-pats concerned however, with many wondering if Facebook has now suffered the same fate as Twitter and youTube. Many fear Facebook will not return anytime soon... The Washington Post appears to be the first official news outlet to confirm the actions of the Chinese authorities."
Earth

Submission + - Did fish poisoning drive Polynesian colonization? (mongabay.com)

Submitted by
rhettb
rhettb writes: "The reasons behind the colonization of the Pacific islands have long been sources of controversy and fascination. Now a new study looks into toxic fish poisoning as a possible migration catalyst.

Between AD 1000 and 1450, Polynesian colonization of the South Pacific flourished. The voyages that were undertaken in the discovery of these new lands were very dangerous and the people who conducted them undoubtedly had good reasons to do so. Researchers from the Florida Institute of Technology have performed research which shows that toxic ciguatera fish poisoning would provide sufficient impetus for such risky voyages.

Ciguatera fish poisoning occurs when fish inadvertently ingest toxic species of dinoflagellate microbes while swimming through infected areas. The toxin then accumulates in the food chain, reaching high levels in predatory fish such as tuna and barracuda. Ciguarera poisoning in humans is characterized by gastrointestinal, cardiovascular, and neurological symptoms, with extreme cases resulting in paralysis or death. Currently it affects between 50,000 and 500,000 globally per year, mostly in tropical and sub-tropical areas. Today, alternative food sources are available when ciguatera fish poisoning occurs; this was often not the case prior to the last century, with exploration of and subsequent migrations to unaffected islands the only course of action if local fish populations became compromised for long periods of time."
Privacy

Submission + - Is 192.com Britain's most invasive website? (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
Barence
Barence writes: "We're constantly warned by security experts not to divulge detailed personal information about ourselves on websites. Well, now we don't have to, because the recently revamped 192.com is doing it for you. And then selling it on for as little as 35p per record. 192.com collates information from various public records and databases — electoral rolls, phone directories, Companies House — and then packages them altogether in one convenient lump. And as this blog post demonstrates, it's staggeringly easy for a complete novice to build up a profile of data on someone that contains all the necessary elements for large scale identity fraud."
Announcements

Submission + - Spider builds life-size decoy of itself

Submitted by
Smivs
Smivs writes: "The BBC are reporting on a species of spider that makes life size relicas of itself, possibly to distract predators.The arachnid's behaviour also offers one explanation for why many spiders like to decorate their webs with strange-looking ornaments. Many animals try to divert the attentions of predators by becoming masters of disguise. Some try to avoid being seen altogether by using camouflage to blend in against a background, such as the peppered moth evolving motley wings that blend into tree bark, or stick insects that look like sticks.The spider may be the first example of an animal building a life-size replica of its own body."
Security

Submission + - Web hosts spooked by OpenSSH exploit (hostgator.com) 1

Submitted by eefsee
eefsee writes: On 7/5 HostGator shut down SSH on all its shared servers. The next day Site5 did the same thing. There are some claims that this is a hole so big in SSH that the baddies can gain root access on their Linux servers, so OpenSSH/SSL services had to be shut down until there was a fix. The odd thing is that there has been no new US-CERT announcement of any such vulnerability. Does anyone know what these hosts are reacting to? Should we all be shutting off OpenSSH on Linux and patching urgently or are these guys over-reacting. The loss of SSH, of course, kills SFTP on these hosts as well. What do customers have to fall back on? FTP. Now that is security!
Privacy

Senators Want To Punish Nokia, Siemens Over Iran 392

Posted by kdawson from the no-cookies-for-you dept.
fast66 writes "After hearing about Nokia-Siemens sale of Internet-monitoring software to Iran, US Senators Schumer and Graham want to bar them from receiving federal contracts. They planned the action after hearing about a joint venture of Nokia Corp. of Finland and Siemens AG of Germany that sold a sophisticated Internet-monitoring system to Iran in 2008. According to Nextgov.com, Schumer and Graham's bill would require the Obama administration to identify foreign companies that export sensitive technology to Iran and ban them from bidding on federal contracts, or renew expiring ones, unless they first stop exports to Iran."

Comment Re:calm down chinaphiles... (Score 1) 142

by Uber Banker (#28468013) Attached to: China Starts/Stops Blocking Google

I've had my ISP's DNS cache occasionally fail to return results, or return an invalid cached result a few times. Doing it for a site as big as Google is embarrassing, but not unheard of.

It's kinda unusual for it to happen blanket across all DNS's at the same instant, following a critical piece of reportage on Google by the government owned television network (which received a 40bn Yuan advertising revenue gift from arch-rival Baidu shortly before the Google critical piece, and shortly after a critical piece on them).

Comment Re:Baidu benefits from being Chinese (Score 2, Informative) 106

by Uber Banker (#28417295) Attached to: <em>Google Suggest</em> Disabled In China Due To Porn
And sadly it's nothing special. When typing a URL that doesn't resolve on a mainland China ISP a Baidu-sponsored search page (full of ads, no simple search box) appears. It was only in 2006 when google.com itself was redirected to baidu.com by some ISPs some of the time. Some of the country (in major cities, forget the countryside) has the facade of development, but with basic corruption endemic at the bottom and top levels, it has a whole lot further to go.

Comment Re:Finally... (Score 1) 505

by Uber Banker (#28410285) Attached to: Memory Usage of Chrome, Firefox 3.5, et al.
Happens here too, but 'a while' tends to be after 6 hours of surfing. I'd put a lot of weight on the plugins, mine are Firebug, Flash Player, British English Dictionary, Chinese Pera-kun (that's it). All are essential to my surfing. But having to force a shut down isn't a big hassle, the OS keeps running, and that's fine.
Medicine

Scientists Wonder What Fingerprints Are For 347

Posted by kdawson from the whorls-and-ridges dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The BBC reports that scientists say they have disproved the theory that fingerprints improve grip by increasing friction between people's fingers and the surface they are holding. Dr Roland Ennos designed a machine which enabled him to measure the amount of friction generated by a fingerprint when it was in contact with an acrylic glass at varying levels of pressure. The results showed that friction levels increased by a much smaller amount than had been anticipated, debunking the hypothesis that fingerprints provide an improved grip. Ennos believes that fingerprints may have evolved to grip onto rough surfaces, like tree bark; the ridges may allow our skin to stretch and deform more easily, protecting it from damage; or they may allow water trapped between our finger pads and the surface to drain away and improve surface contact in wet conditions. Other researchers have suggested that the ridges could increase our fingerpads' touch sensitivity."

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"The fundamental principle of science, the definition almost, is this: the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment." -- Richard P. Feynman

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