199317
submission
Nephilium writes:
A former TV weatherman is surveying the 1,221 climate measuring stations in the USA. In the two weeks since the project was started, they've gotten surveys of 50 of the sites. At at least 10 of the stations, there were issues that would cause the temperatures to be measured higher then the actual temperature. These elements range from being placed near a large parking lot, to air conditioning exhaust, to a barrel used to burn trash, to jet exhaust. This data is used by scientists studying climate change, isn't it important to at least make sure the measuring stations providing data are sending accurate data?
199279
submission
davecb writes:
A prototype anti-virus system
developed at the University of Michigan uses the "fingerprint" of virus activity to more effectively identify viruses. The system obtains such fingerprints by intentionally infecting a quarantined computer with viruses. Conventional anti-virus software monitors systems for suspicious activity and then tries to determine the source by checking for virus signatures, which makes it difficult to spot new pieces of malware and track different variations.
The University of Michigan team studied the files and processes malware created and modified on an infected computer, and developed software that uses the information gathered to identify malware. The prototype is capable of defining clusters of malware that operate in similar ways, and can create a kind of family tree that illustrates how superficially different programs have similar methods of operation. In tests on the same software, the prototype was able to identify at least 10 percent more of the sample than five leading anti-virus programs. The prototype also always correctly connected different pieces of malware that operate similarly, while the best anti-virus program was only able to identify 68 percent of such links. (Courtesy of ACM Technews)
199213
submission
Amiga Trombone writes:
Immigration attorneys from Cohen & Grigsby explain how they assist employers in running classified ads with the goal of NOT finding any qualified applicants, and the steps they go through to disqualify even the most qualified Americans in order to secure green cards for H-1b workers. See what Bush and Congress really mean by a "shortage of skilled U.S. workers." Microsoft, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, and thousands of other companies are running fake ads in Sunday newspapers across the country each week.
199033
story
gordette writes
"I'm posting this because Comcast did the same thing to me that this journalist describes — held my HD channels hostage by insisting that I shell out for an expensive cable package. The journalist is blasting Comcast for their 'shakedown' of consumers, and is doing so in full view of industry insiders. She also links to an earlier blog post describing Comcast's Motorola DVR problems."
199159
submission
lymeca writes:
LinuxWorld reports that Sun Microsystem's ZFS filesystem has been converted from its incanartion in OpenSolaris to a module capable of running in the Linux user-space filsystem project, FUSE. Because of the license incompatibilities with the Linux kernel, it has not yet been integrated for distribution within the kernel itself. This project, called ZFS on FUSE, aims to enable GNU/Linux users to use ZFS as a process in userspace, bypassing the legal barrier inherent in having the filesystem coded into the Linux kernel itself. Booting from a ZFS partition has been confirmed to work. The performance currently clocks in at about half as fast as XFS, but with all the success the NTFS-3g project has had creating a high performance FUSE implementation of the NTFS filesystem, there's hope that performance tweaking could yield a practical elimination of barriers for GNU/Linux users to make use of all that ZFS has to offer.
199079
submission
bingbong writes:
I'm a DVD addict with a large DVD collection. I want to save space and rip all my DVDs to a storage drive, and then serve them to my various TVs around the house. Are there any suggestions for ripping, cataloging and streaming software? I might also be moving to the UK from the US in the next year. So ideally this system would be something i could use over there.
so that's my dream. Any thoughts?
186139
submission
epistemiclife writes:
CNN reports that a professor at MIT
has resigned in protest, because a colleague was denied tenure. He charges that it was because he is
black. DiverseEducation.com expounds
upon this, by referencing similar issues with MIT in the past, as well as
with other institutions which focus on science and engineering.
186133
submission
186071
submission
infeon writes:
[01-Jun-2007] The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.2.3. This release continues to improve the security and the stability of the 5.X branch as well as addressing two regressions introduced by the previous 5.2 releases. These regressions relate to the timeout handling over non-blocking SSL connections and the lack of HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA in certain conditions. All users are encouraged to upgrade to this release.
149239
story
George Maschke writes
"Cryptome, a website concerned with encryption, privacy, and government secrecy, has received two weeks' notice from Verio that its service will be terminated for unspecified "violation of [its] Acceptable Use Policy." Cryptome has a history of making publicly available documents and information that governments would rather keep secret. For the notice, and a public response by Cryptome webmaster John Young, see Cryptome Shutdown by Verio/NTT."
149233
story
Stephen Samuel writes
"The CBC is reporting that
Star Trek actor James Doohan ("Scotty") achieved his hopes of having his ashes launched into space when a package containing some of his ashes, ashes of Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper and about 200 other people were carried into sub-orbital space by a 6 meter (20') rocket. The rocket was launched by UP Aerospace from "Spaceport America", a commercial spaceport being developed in the southern New Mexico desert."
149119
story
prostoalex writes
"The New York Times is running a story on a Silicon Valley company that is planning to revolutionize the movie business. It's no secret that the movie-going experience has been deteriorating, while the number of HDTVs sold has been rising steadily. A company called Vudu, run by a guy who started TiVo, is now building a box for peer-to-peer download of movies straight from the studios. That could enables the movie studios to make movies securely available to viewers on the day of release, and improves on the download experience offered by other shops, like Amazon Unbox, MovieLink and others: 'DVD sales began to stagnate because studios had finally plowed through their entire backlog of movies that could be released on the shiny discs. The success of iTunes was also proving that the digital transition was inevitable and that one powerful player, Apple, could control the market if Hollywood did not find other viable partners. And outlaw services like the pirate Web sites that use BitTorrent technology demonstrated that digital piracy, which had consumed the music business first, now posed a real problem for Hollywood.'"
